Riot has officially admitted that the plan from the past years simply stopped working.
Many people have asked themselves when Riot will have to slow down a bit and stop releasing so many new characters. Today it is already known that it will happen in 2022. The studio has officially admitted that it is unable to maintain the current pace.
There are several reasons, but the developers mention that after the delayed release of Vex, they understood that quality is what counts, not quantity. A delay to refine this character had a very positive impact on its reception.
There will be fewer new characters now
Riot in its video about heroes for 2022 confirmed what previously could only be guessed. In fact, there will be fewer characters now, the studio will simply slow down and will no longer implement plans at any cost.
“Last year, our goal was to release one champion for each lane except the middle one, which was supposed to get two. When we planned to release champions for this year, we realized that we couldn’t have the same goal for 2022 if we wanted everyone to have the right amount of time and attention dedicated. So we’re going to slow down a bit.”
What does it mean? It’s just that Riot is abandoning its plan to release characters for every single line every year. Sometimes it will take a year or longer for your role to get someone new. Well, with one exception.
(…) We’ll probably still create more heroes in the middle to keep the balance between mages and assassins. (…)
So MID has nothing to fear. The rest… It could be different. In pure theory, Riot already has plans for all roles, but won’t necessarily fulfill them. In addition to Zeri, few champions have already been announced for:
- Support
- Jungle
- Bot
So not only TOP is missing, but it is also quiet about MID, especially considering that Riot wants to keep a high number of characters for this line. We’ll have to wait to see. Last year was very intense when it comes to not only LoL itself but the universe in general.