League of Legends publisher, Riot Games, is pretty much known only for the MOBA. One of the most popular esports in the world, LoL has been popular for years! Now the company has just confirmed that they’re expanding their game library – with a new fighting game!
At the EVO Championship Series 2019, tournament organizer Tom Cannon, who is also an employee of Riot Games, confirmed what many suspected for some time. In 2016, Riot absorbed a smaller developer company – Radiant Entertainment. They are known for creating Rising Thunder and despite being popular at the time, there hasn’t exactly been news from them since then.
Now we know why – they’ve been working on something new. That said, what that something is is completely unknown – it could be anything from a spin-off of League of Legends to a sequel or prequel to Rising Thunder to something completely brand new. No details have been made public at this point, nor is there any sort of release schedule or even planned news update.
Well, the one thing we DO know is that the game in question will be a fighting title, as confirmed by Cannon at EVO. “Back in 2016, when we joined forces with Riot, I said that we were going to go in the hole for a while,” Cannon said, “and I want to be able to let people in on maybe the worst kept secret in the universe, which is I can confirm that we are working on a fighting game for Riot.”
Rising Thunder, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a game in which giant robots battle in one-on-one fights. A relatively simple approach that nevertheless worked well. Cannon was one of the co-founders of Radiant Entertainment, and thus can pretty much be considered the expert on this topic when it comes to Riot Games.
Cannon did mention that this game has been in development for some time and will continue to be in development for some time more – he acknowledges how difficult fighting games are to make. “I’m not here to say that the game is coming out soon, but we feel that we are making progress and I thought it would be appropriate to kind of ‘reset’ the conversation and let everyone know that we are doing what you thought we were doing. That is it for now. When there is more to say, I will be the first one to.”
If nothing else, Riot Games will finally live up to its name and actually have multiple gameS under their belt. Cannon also clearly had a lot of fun with the whole announcement. Given that it wasn’t exactly a well-kept secret, several people were told ahead of time, while lots of fans already suspected anyway – in a series of tweets, he later joked about his announcement during the stream at EVO.
Speaking of – the popular sporting tournament was a smashing success, taking place last weekend in Las Vegas. Thousands of excited fans of all sorts of fighting games assembled and competed in tournaments for lots of different games – from Tekken to Blaz Blue, the top of the crop of fighting games was represented there!
