​‘League Of Legends’ Dev Takes Aim At Blizzard With ‘Hearthstone’ And ‘Overwatch’ Competitors

It was a big night for Riot Games last night. The developer announced two new games, as well as the news that League of Legends, it's hugely popular MOBA will be making its way to consoles. Both the new games appear to be taking aim at Blizzard, one of them is a competitive card game, similar to Hearthstone, and the other is a class-based shooter, similar to Overwatch.

Legends of Runeterra is Riot's free-to-play competitive card game. Like Hearthstone does with Warcraft's world, Runeterra will draw from League of Legend's cast of heroes and creatures.

One big difference between Runeterra and Hearthstone is that you won't have to buy booster packs with the hope that the card you want will turn up, instead you can directly buy individual cards, either with real money or in-game currency you've earned through play.

See some of it in action in the video below:

You can pre-register to get access when the game goes live. The official release will be some time next year.

Riot also showed off a game that's in earlier stages, a competitive shooter that takes aim at Overwatch. Currently called Project A, it will feature characters with special abilities and colour palette that is reminiscent of League of Legends. Though, it's not clear if the two games are linked. Where it stands out from games like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 is that it appears you won't need to pour shots into enemies with giant health bars. Instead, you can take out your opponents with much fewer shots, almost akin to Counter-Strike.

You can see a prototype build of the game in action below:

Riot makes clear that a focus in Project A is making sure the game is responsive, with as low a ping as possible, and that it will have a robust anti-cheat system built into the game.

Riot also revealed League of Legends is coming to console and mobile as a game called Wild Rift. "Wild Rift is not a port of LoL on PC," said Riot Games in a press release. "It is a new game built from scratch to ensure it is a polished, legitimate LoL experience that's worth players' time."

See it in action below:

One way in which Wild Rift differs from League of Legends on the PC is that it's built to be played with a twin-stick control scheme - whereas on PC it's played with a mouse and keyboard and there's no emphasis on directing your character.

Rounds of Wild Rift are also meant to be much shorter, taking less than 20 minutes, compared to the more than 40 minute rounds you'll often find on PC.

Topics: League of Legends, Riot Games