Riot Games is making a big change to its Vanguard anti-cheat system: After an update set to go live today (and which may already be live by the time you read this) it will not launch when your PC boots up, but will instead will be "on demand," meaning it will only run when playing a game and will shut down once the gameplay is over.

Vanguard was very controversial when it launched in 2020 because it's "kernel mode" software that, in theory at least, grants Riot access to your PC at an alarmingly deep level. On top of that intrusiveness, it's also effectively omnipresent: It launches when your PC does, and it runs quietly in the background, doing whatever, until you shut down.

Other games roll with kernel mode anti-cheat, like Genshin Impact, Doom Eternal, and Call of Duty games, but in those cases the anti-cheat only runs when the game is running, and terminates when the game does. Now, finally, Riot will give League of Legends and Valorant players the same option—with some conditions.

"Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices," Riot's anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas wrote in an update announcing the change.

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"'On-demand' here means that Vanguard’s driver component will no longer launch when the system starts, but 'secured' indicates that this will be possible only if that system’s hardware has met a set of modern security requirements. By opting into pre-boot security mechanisms and Windows’ own native protection features, Vanguard can safely end its watch, and your taskbar can have 256 of its pixels back."

Those "pre-boot security mechanisms" are the conditions in question, and for the vast majority of players it's a matter of convenience rather than capability. Koskinas said that roughly 35% of Riot's players already satisfy the conditions required for Vanguard's new "Pre-Check, " so the option to switch Vanguard into on-demand mode will appear automatically after the update goes live.

For just about everyone else, there's more: You'll need to be running Windows 11 25H2 or later, and have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, VBS, HVCI, and IOMMU all switched on. If you want to know what all of that means, or what they do, the full update has the details; it gets technical, but you won't need to get into the weeds to get it all set up. You will probably need to do a little dicking around in your BIOS, though, which may or may not sound like your idea of a good time.

I say "just about everyone else" because, according to the update, about 3% of Riot's players are on older hardware that can't meet the Pre-Check requirements—so for them, the on demand option simply won't be available unless and until they upgrade. Vanguard will continue to operate as it is for the foreseeable future, however, so Riot said it's not really an issue: "We’re not making anyone change anything. We’re willing to wait until the ecosystem matures."

That also holds if you're happy with Vanguard as it is (and if you've been playing Valorant or League or the past few years with no complaint, there's a good chance you are) and don't care about any of this: You can just ignore all of this, do nothing, and carry on as usual.

Koskinas said it's taken this long to give Vanguard an on-demand option because it wasn't until fairly recently that Windows and PC hardware had built-in security features sufficient to enable it.

"Microsoft and PC equipment manufacturers have long-recognized the need for cryptographic verification of boot processes and of the kernel, so they’ve been cookin’ up heat for quite some time," he explained.

"The resulting oven-fresh security features require newer hardware components and newer versions of Windows, but through the power of collaboration and the combined might of our wills, we’ve worked directly with the inestimable Xbox OS Security Team at Microsoft to see improvements made natively to the Windows kernel that have finally afforded us the opportunity to offer an on-demand mode within the Vanguard product."

Koskinas also said that as botting becomes increasingly complex and accessible with the advent of AI, Riot will continue to advance its own anti-cheat efforts. "That said, friction is not fun, and we prefer incentives to requirements," he concluded. "For that reason, our trust segmentation will be surgical, and while we might add more checks to Pre-Check in the future, we plan on keeping things optional until you’re in the most competitive segments, on the strangest devices, or amongst the highest ranks."

We haven't heard much about Riot's League of Legends MMO—basically nothing, if you get down to it—but it's still alive and kicking, and today it kicked again: Brian Holinka, who spent more than a decade at Blizzard, including nearly five years as the lead combat designer on World of Warcraft, has joined the dev team.

"Today is my first official day at Riot on the League of Legends MMO!" Holinka wrote on LinkedIn (via PCGamesN). And, well, that's the extent of it, except that the page indicates Holinka is now employed as principal game designer on the League of Legends MMO.

Holinka actually left Blizzard in 2023 and joined Fantastic Pixel Castle, the studio founded that same year by former Riot Games vice president Greg Street. Prior to his departure from Riot, Street had been heading up development of the League of Legends MMO, and Fantastic Pixel Castle's debut project was also meant to be an MMO—but that fell apart when NetEase ended funding in 2025.

The hiring of Holinka comes less than five months after Riot added former World of Warcraft lead producer Raymond Bartos to its MMO development team, and confirms continued turning-of-the-wheels on the game. Riot has never formally suggested those wheels weren't turning, to be clear, but the League MMO was revealed in December 2020 and it's been pretty much dead silence ever since, except that Street—the guy who announced the game in the first place—was leaving. Riot previously added former WoW lead software engineer Orlando Salvatore to its roster in October 2024.

Street, for the record, also apparently has a new gig in the games industry, although he hasn't yet revealed what it is. He did say on his own LinkedIn page that "it's not an MMO, at least not yet."

The Fortnitification of videogames has seeped into just about every live-service excursion at this point. You can play as Nicki Minaj in Call of Duty. Final Fantasy 14 is getting an Evangelion raid series in its next expansion. Tekken 8 just announced a Baki character as its final Season 3 DLC fighter. Media can no longer exist on its own, it must merge and coalesce into an amorphous glob of characters and celebrities.

One notable exception has been Riot's games, particularly League of Legends and Valorant. While there are skins that certainly appear inspired by other famous media, it's never outright crossed over with other characters. And it'll be staying that way, according to League's lead designer August Browning.

During a stream on his Twitch channel (clipped and edited by HeWhoQuacksss), Browning responded to a question on how open Riot was to including third-party skins. "We've been pretty not open to that," he said. "The second you do third-party skins, the tone of your game completely changes."

He then goes ahead and talks about some of the games that have gone all in on collaborations. "Now that doesn't mean it's bad—it's really cool to play Overwatch and play all these anime characters and K-pop idols and things like that, right? It's cool to go into Fortnite, and have Goku and Jinx fighting Ariana Grande and Peter Griffin. But tonally speaking, it is also very different from the tone of all the characters in [League]."

Browning goes on to say that "historically, Riot has been pretty hesitant to do skins from other IPs," though highlights that the game does have a Louis Vuitton skin for Sena as well as a Swain skin that "looks very similar to certain chicken establishments." But overall? Browning calls straight-up crossing over other characters "a big step."

I mean, I get it. I don't need every videogame I ever play to put all my favourite characters from other stuff in it. I love Persona 5, but I don't need Joker making an appearance everywhere I go, you know? I have to agree with Browning's sentiment that all of these collaborations can drastically shift your game tonally, and I'd even go so far as to say it can really water down a game's identity.

Is putting Godzilla in Crocs and making him do K-Pop dances in Fortnite inherently funny? Obviously it is, but that ridiculousness loses its edge when everyone is doing it. Though I wouldn't consider myself the biggest enjoyer of Riot's library, I certainly appreciate its desire to stay in its own lane.

"Congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight," Riot Games taunts on X. A whole bunch of nefarious hardware tinkerers seem to now be on the wrong end of the company's Vanguard anti-cheat, as it seems Riot has gone beyond kernel-level and confounded even cheaters' attempts to bypass the anti-cheat by using a physical piece of hardware that directly accesses system memory to get to game data.

As anti-cheats have gotten more advanced, so have cheats, thus the perpetual arms race between game devs and cheaters. Usually, this involves going deeper and deeper into the system.

Once upon a time, cheat software would have run as a standard app in the OS by hooking game data directly from the game through normal methods—ie, using data that the operating system normally allows apps to read and change.

Most big games can prevent these attacks very easily now, though, so cheat makers started making their cheats hook information from deeper in the software stack, at 'ring 0', the kernel level where things like drivers live. Here, the cheat can read game data from memory without having to jump through the usual hoops that apps do, meaning they can bypass the anti-cheats that were developed to stop the previously mentioned cheats.

Thus, the kernel-level anti-cheat was born. These anti-cheats, which are used in games like Valorant, get access to relevant information at the kernel level, allowing them to check for dodgy software that runs at this level, too. If they detect cheat software running at the kernel level and hooking and changing game data illegitimately, they can block it and ban you.

So that's that, right? Nothing more to solve? Not quite, because there is a layer deeper than ring 0, and that's the hardware level. Kernel-level anti-cheats check for dodgy doings at the lowest level of the operating system, but that won't help if the dodginess occurs prior to making its way into the operating system's proper stack. Which is exactly the case with these DMA cards Riot is referring to.

Essentially, Direct Memory Access (DMA) cards do what they say on the tin: access memory directly. When games run, the data that's used regularly and needed quickly is held in RAM, and other hardware (such as the GPU) usually reads and writes to this with the CPU's mediation.

Many modern CPUs, however, sometimes permit hardware to bypass the CPU and access RAM directly for the sake of latency. Naturally, cheaters have jumped on this and started using DMA cards that physically slot into your PCIe slot and pretend to be harmless, but actually read game data directly from system memory to cheat at the lowest level, getting in before even ring 0, kernel-level anti-cheats can spot them.

Combatting this has meant ensuring the CPU's IOMMU (Input–output memory management unit) actually checks the right hardware and doesn't let rogue DMA cards, for instance, bypass the CPU. Previously, motherboard firmware didn't get IOMMU booting up and checking things soon enough to detect the dodgy DMAs, but this was patched with BIOS updates late last year.

Riot's X post was actually in response to another by ogisada which states, "Today’s Vanguard anti-cheat update blocked the majority of DMA firmwares using SATA/NVMe."

Given this, and Riot's lack of contestation over any of these details, it seems cheaters had still been managing to use DMA cards to cheat by disguising them as SATA or NVMe drives. But no longer.

The post by ogisada—which, again, Riot doesn't seem to contest—also states the following: "VGK suddenly triggered an IOMMU restart warning in-game, after which the DMA firmware becomes completely unusable, even without the game running or after uninstalling Vanguard. Only fix is a full OS reinstall."

In other words: paperweights. $6,000 bricks.

The response I've seen online has been mixed, with some claiming it's too far for Riot to mess with hardware like this. To my understanding, at least, it doesn't seem like any actual hardware has been messed with, just its means of interfacing with the operating system. Whatever the case, love it or hate it, Riot's never been one to hold back on its anti-cheat methods, and a bunch of cheaters are presumably finding that out now in a very expensive way.

A Financial Times report (via Reuters) says the US government is debating whether Tencent's holdings in US and Finnish videogame companies pose a national security risk, and whether it should be forced to divest them. Multiple sources said cabinet officials were scheduled to have a meeting on the matter earlier this week, ahead of US president Donald Trump's scheduled meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, but the meeting was postponed due to scheduling conflicts.

Chinese conglomerate Tencent is a major player in the Western games market. It owns studios including Riot Games and Digital Extremes outright, and has significant holdings in Epic, Larian, FromSoft, Krafton, Ubisoft, Remedy, Inflexion, Supercell, and numerous others. The FT report says that's led to concern in the US government that Tencent could gain access to personal data of US citizens, something that's traditionally been reserved for the US government and companies. (Like here. And here, and here. Oh, and here.)

(And here.)

This process has been dragging on for a while now. The US government initially turned its attention to Tencent's gaming holdings in 2020 during the first Trump administration, eventually leading to negotiations that seemed to be successful, at least to the extent that Tencent wasn't forced to sell off its holdings—although in 2025, Tencent was declared a Chinese military company by the US Department of Defense.

The second Trump administration, which we are now just over a year into, has been much more overt in its corrupt, chaotic corporate dealings. In 2025, for instance, the US arm of TikTok was sold to a company whose "managing investors" include Oracle, owned by billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, and Silver Lake, a private equity firm that joined with investment firm Affinity Partners, owned by Trump son-in-law Jared Kusher, to assist with Saudi Arabia's acquisition of Electronic Arts. Trump also weighed in on Netflix's attempted acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the proposed deal "could be a problem"; Netflix eventually bowed out and WBD went to Paramount, which is owned by Larry Ellison's son David, in a deal backed by—you guessed it—Saudi Arabia.

Chaos could also very easily be the result of forcing Tencent to pull out of the US games industry. Finding new money to fill the gaps left by Tencent would be a challenge to say the least, and I would guess that at least some of the larger companies involved would end up in the hands of private equity, much as TikTok did. Is that bad? Anything can happen, but this excerpt from PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter's outstanding breakdown of why the EA buyout has everyone nervous lays the reality out clearly:

"Private equity has maimed retail franchises like Party City. It has brutalized digital media outlets like the Gizmodo Media Group and demolished local news across the US. It's left hospitals full of bats and increased mortality in retirement homes. A report using S&P data found that in 2024, private equity-backed companies accounted for more than 10% of all corporate bankruptcies and over 50% of bankruptcies with over $500 million in liabilities—but "despite their role in precipitating bankruptcies, private equity firms often emerge financially unscathed."

It's not always like that, but often enough that a private equity buyout is generally not considered a desirable outcome, and given the precarious state of the games industry already I think I'd rather not tempt fate.

I've reached out to Tencent for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

MOBAs are interesting videogames—imagine, if you will, a slot machine. Then imagine that slot machine takes forty minutes to do one pull of the arm, and also it's yelling colourful and exciting swearwords at you in a language you don't understand the entire time. That's sort of what playing a MOBA with public voice chat is like.

League of Legends might be joining those hallowed halls of flaming, as suggested by files found on the public build environment (PBE) by SkinSpotlights on X. The files in question include reports for "VOICE COMMS ABUSE", as well as entries for a comms panel that include voice options for party or team.

While League of Legends has let you communicate over voice with folks you're partied up with for a while, being able to yell at strangers is an entirely new ballgame for the MOBA and… oh god, let me tell you, you aren't missing out on much. I'm not even sure why Riot's adding this function, bar capitalising on the Discord fiasco.

Here are my credentials: I have over 2,400 hours on Dota 2, and approaching 200 hours in Deadlock. I wouldn't consider myself "good" at MOBAs (because no one truly is), however, I am very experienced in the absolute torture chamber that is having your voice chat turned on while someone chews you out for feeding in your lane, only for you to be forced into the social equivalent of a small, confined space with them for a 30-minute match.

I don't want to be a cynic. I don't think people are inherently bad. But MOBAs are a special kind of pressure cooker that makes people act out and reach for their favourite book of slurs the moment something goes slightly wrong.

In several of my recent Deadlock games, I've had to gently encourage my teammates not to tilt themselves because the early game goes even slightly not their way. People get mad, explosively and often, and as one player in the game's subreddit observes, "How fitting for League that the first hint at voice chat we get is the report function."

The upshot of this is that, generally speaking, voice chat does promote a lot of cooperation when the vibes are good. And believe it or not, that can absolutely happen. At the very least PCG contributor Izabela Tomakic seems to think so. But also: Prepare for naughty words and implications about your mother/father/dog from some very furious people. Or just turn voice chat off, as is your right.

I've reached out to Riot to see if this is a fully-fledged feature or just something preliminary dug up in the game files, and I'll update this article if I receive a response.

Just a couple of days after announcing it was slashing the 2XKO team in half, Riot says it's "still fully committed and working hard" on the game, and to prove that? Two new characters and the promise to iron out some of its more glaring issues.

In a blog post titled "What's Next + New Champs," game director Shaun Rivera said that the team is "doubling down on building for the FGC that loves this genre." What that looks like for 2XKO—right now, anyway—is keeping things pretty much the same while cleaning up a few problem areas.

"We've seen the conversation about what our core gameplay could or should look like in the future, and we want to clear one thing up," Rivera said. "We love that 2XKO is fast-paced, allowing your reactions and creativity to shine while providing a ton of depth to dig into. The skill ceiling of this game is high, and that's where it's gonna stay.

"We'll continue making balance changes that hit outliers in the meta while keeping the sauce of every character. At a high level, we want every champion to have defined strengths and weaknesses, and right now that's not clear enough across all of the cast." Rivera specifically highlights Ekko and Yasuo as two of the "sauciest in the roster," noting that their "weaknesses aren't apparently enough at the highest level of play."

Rivera also says that it's still full steam ahead for 2XKO's competitive scene—its Challenger event at Genesis X3 took place over the weekend—and is even planning to add access to some "exclusive in-game prizing" at locals to "reward players for joining their local community." This is something I'm particularly fond of—locals are the lifeblood of the FGC, and finding ways to encourage folks to get out and get stuck in through in-game rewards is mighty enticing.

As for what's new, 2XKO is planning to throw in a local duos mode at some point in the future, which'll let two players team up couch co-op style. Right now that's something you can only do online, but Rivera says the team wants to make "that experience more accessible."

The blog post also, surprisingly, dropped two new character teasers. The first one is for Akali, who Rivera describes as "a sharp, stylish ninja who cuts opponents down with deadly precision." The second is Senna who can "blast enemies with a massive cannon, then rush them down in her wraith form."

The post shares some very small work-in-progress clips of both champs, though there's unfortunately no word on when either one will be added to the roster yet.

It certainly seems like Riot is determined to keep plugging away at 2XKO for now, even after its layoff announcement. I still can't help but be a little wary—I've no idea what the developer actually wants or expects out of this game, and there's certainly a small anxiety eating away at me that once all of the pre-prepared content dries up, there'll be nothing left on the docket.

Just three weeks after its grand 1.0 launch and console release, Riot has slashed the 2XKO team in half. Around 80 employees are out of a job, some of whom have been around since the game's beginning.

Why? According to the developer's own words, "As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO. The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term."

Translation: People aren't flooding to 2XKO. The ones who are? Many aren't sticking with it long enough to dump an egregious amount of money on its skins.

It's a damning assessment so early on into the game's life. Even factoring in its early access release on PC, 2XKO couldn't even make it half a year before Riot decided it wasn't doing good enough. The developer maintains that the journey isn't over, but forgive me if I can't help but feel like the final destination is fast approaching.

The thing is, I cannot fathom what Riot wants or wanted from 2XKO. What kind of momentum did it expect from what is essentially a niche within a niche?

Specialist

I love fighting games, I've been playing them most of my life. I attend tournaments and my locals and try to stay as actively involved as I can, even when I'm not playing. But I also recognise they're not the absolute gangbusters they once were. Street Fighter and Tekken still do moderately well for themselves. Mortal Kombat finds an ample casual audience with each new release, and anime fighters like Guilty Gear Strive continue to pump out characters and content.

But they're not shooters. They're not MOBAs. The FGC is strong, but relatively speaking it's also small. They're intricate beasts where getting good involves studying frame data, punishers, and overcoming knowledge checks without any teammates to point fingers at when things go wrong. It's not exactly the most accessible genre.

That alone pushes fighting games into a niche. But make it a tag fighter, adding a second character you have to learn and essentially doubling your workload? It stuffs the game even further into that specialised box.

It was never going to have folks going to it like a moth to a flame. It can be a tough sell even to the FGC, let alone casuals or future fighting game fans peering in and looking for their first foray into the genre. Was Riot expecting Street Fighter level of fame out of the gate—a fighter that has almost 40 years of refinement and evolution behind it? Surely not, because that would be a very stupid thing to expect.

I do have to wonder if it was expecting a similar phenomenon to what it saw with Valorant. A game that waded into the territory Counter Strike had held down for so long—with a little corner inhabited by Rainbow Six Siege—and almost immediately cemented itself as solid competition. It's a game still going strong five years down the line, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Counter-Strike is also, you know, one of the most played games on the daily. With far more transferable skills across other shooters (and videogames in general). Valorant was always going to be a lower barrier of entry both executionally and mentally.

Even outside of any expectations, 2XKO is a game stuck in a weird limbo where the group it appeals to is disastrously small. It's not approachable enough to reel in the wealth of League players or Arcane fans, while transferring over its more unsavoury practices that are an immediate turn-off to the FGC—like ridiculously expensive skin bundles and grinding to unlock characters.

Combine all that with a painfully small roster (which feels even more claustrophobic when you gotta pick two of 'em) and it doesn't surprise me that 2XKO has struggled to come blazing out of the gate. But it also feels like Riot hasn't even given it a chance to fix up first.

Improvements are coming, but I can't see how announcing that in the same breath as putting half your team out of work is going to pick up the momentum Riot is so desperately craving. It feels more like a death knell, one that is understandably going to make its "passionate core audience" apprehensive to dedicate themselves to the game financially.

Maybe we'll find out exactly what Riot is expecting out of 2XKO when it shares its plans. When? "Soon." Let's hope we at least get through a single season of the game and a sizeable roster before any more downsizing threatens to kill the game off entirely.

Just a few weeks after the official launch of its 2v2 fighting game 2XKO, Riot Games is reducing the size of its development team by nearly half and laying off employees.

"As we expanded from PC to console, we saw consistent trends in how players were engaging with 2XKO," executive producer Tom Cannon wrote in today's announcement. "The game has resonated with a passionate core audience, but overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term.

"With a smaller, focused team, we're going to dig in and make key improvements to the game, including some of the things we've already heard you asking for. We'll share some of our plans soon."

Riot told PC Gamer that about 80 roles are being eliminated, a little less than half the total 2XKO dev team, but an actual total isn't known at this point as developers impacted by the cuts will have the opportunity to apply for other jobs at the company. Riot also said its plans for 2XKO's 2026 Competitive Series remain unchanged.

The cuts to the 2XKO team would seem to be the latest move in a "refocusing" process that began two years ago when Riot closed its Riot Forge program and laid off 530 employees. CEO Dylan Jadeja said at the time that Riot had made "a number of big bets" since 2019 that weren't paying off adequately, and so it was going to shift its attention to "fewer, high-impact projects."

More layoffs followed in October 2024, although Riot co-founder Marc Merrill said at the time that the League of Legends development team "will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League." Hints about that dropped at the end of 2025, when League executive producer Paul "Pabro" Bellezza and head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon posted a video acknowledging that the studio has "been working on some bigger updates to League."

2XKO had been in development for close to a decade prior to its full release: It was first announced in 2019 but rumors of its existence went as far back as Riot's acquisition of Radiant Entertainment in 2016.

Following a short closed beta test, it launched into early access in October 2025, and then hit 1.0 on January 20, just 20 days ago. 2XKO isn't on Steam so we don't have access to player numbers, but cutting the team in half less than three weeks after launch doesn't point to good things. Riot said more information will be shared soon.

You'd be forgiven for forgetting about the League of Legends MMO in development at Riot Games. More than five years after it was first revealed, it still remains the stuff of imagination: It's been three years since Greg Street, the then-VP who announced the project, left Riot, and two years since Riot "reset" development, and we still have nothing to show for it but promises that yes, it is still happening.

It might look from the outside like the whole thing is floundering, but it appears that the wheels are turning, or at least that someone is revving the engine with intent: Riot has now added former World of Warcraft lead producer Raymond Bartos to its MMO development team.

"From my very first conversation with Riot, I immediately gravitated toward their values—and I was genuinely impressed by how clearly those values showed up throughout the interview process," Bartos wrote on LinkedIn (via MassivelyOP). "It made it obvious that kindness, respect, and care aren’t just words here, but something the team truly lives by.

"I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to join such an inspiring group of people, and I can’t wait to get started—showing up every day to provide value for Riot gamers and help deliver an MMO experience players truly enjoy."

Bartos also expressed excitement at rejoining his "longtime duo partner" Orlando Salvatore, a former World of Warcraft lead software engineer who moved from Blizzard to Riot in October 2024: "Given our track record on World of Warcraft, I have a feeling we’ll be moving fast on day one."

Signs of life are good, although I don't think I'm quite ready to buy into the "moving fast" thing just yet. The most recent ETA on the LoL MMO, delivered in early 2025, is "hopefully before we go to Mars," which isn't the most clearly delineated release target I've ever seen. Riot has other pressing matters on its hands as well: A major overhaul of the aging League of Legends aimed at getting new players into the notoriously unforgiving game is reportedly in the works for 2027.

After a drawn-out development that can generously be described as very rough, Hytale launched into early access earlier this week, a long overdue accomplishment acknowledged by none other than League of Legends studio Riot Games.

"Congrats on early access," Riot posted on X, along with a fistbump emoji. In response, Hytale posted a salute emoji and wrote, "Thank you for helping bring Hytale home."

It's a small, low-key exchange, but notable nonetheless for one very obvious reason: Riot acquired Hypixel Studios in 2020, not long after Hypixel gave us our first look at Hytale, and then a half-decade later pulled the plug on the whole thing and shut the studio down without anything to show for it. Hypixel co-founder Noxy, who went to Riot along with the studio, said when the game was cancelled that "after years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise."

That happens sometimes, sure, but the situation took something of an awkward twist when, after some presumably fast-and-furious negotiations, founder Simon Collins-Laflamme bought it all back from Riot, and less than two months later rolled out an early access release that became an immediate hit. Hytale isn't on Steam so we don't have access to player numbers, but it racked up more than 420,000 viewers on Twitch when it went live, becoming the most-watched game on the platform, and that points to good things.

Also notable, Collins-Laflamme said the day before launch that Hytale had "officially secured the next two years of development costs through pre-purchases."

And it's not just a matter of pent-up hype that'll fizzle out quickly. Collins-Laflamme has previously warned that Hytale "isn't good yet," but PC Gamer's Chris Livingston says that actually, it is. "It's very early access," Chris wrote of his early time with the game, with plenty of incomplete or missing content, "but what's here and working works well."

Riot might be feeling a little bit of a sting on this one—the decidedly subdued message reminds me of Phil Spencer congratulating Valve for announcing new Steam hardware in 2025—but it's just as possible the studio is happy enough to be done with it, and it's to Riot's credit that it was willing to sell Hytale back to its creators instead of locking it in the IP vault. Riot had big-publisher aspirations some years ago but it didn't really work out, and more recently it's been stepping back from those ambitions so it can refocus on League of Legends instead. Either way, it's a classy move, and it's nice to see that publicly at least, there are no hard feelings.

When Valorant launched back in 2020, it was pitched as Counter-Strike with added superpowers, a combination that proved irresistible for shooter expert Morgan Park in PC Gamer's Valorant review. Over the last few years, however, the emphasis has gradually shifted to the point where Valorant has turned into superpowers with added Counter-Strike.

This problem came to a head last year, with Riot promising to cut back on supplementary utility powers to reorient Valorant back around gunplay. This initiative is set to continue through 2026, with Valorant's latest patch introducing a new gun as Riot promises more extensive weapon reworks in the future.

That new gun is called the Bandit, a semiautomatic pistol designed to fill the gap between the silenced Ghost and Valorant's high-powered revolver, the Sheriff. The Bandit gives players a higher rate of fire than the Sheriff and superior damage compared to the Ghost, able to deal instant kills on headshots against lightly armoured players. Riot believes this should add some extra spice to those early, pistol-heavy rounds.

While the Bandit's addition is the only major weapon change in the update, Riot says it's indicative of the studio's broader plans for Valorant in 2026. "Since we started putting the emphasis on gunplay in 2025, we're going to use 2026 to take a holistic look at our arsenal and core combat loop, to make adjustments where needed," says Riot's product manager for Gameplay, Tiffy, in a video detailing the update.

Elsewhere, the update brings a substantial overhaul to one of Valorant's maps, Breeze. Riot says that player feedback indicated Breeze's open design was a little too open, so the developer has sprinkled in more cover and closed off some of its larger spaces to tighten up combat encounters. Two other maps, Haven and Corrode, have also been tweaked slightly to make wall penetration more predictable.

The update also introduces a new, temporary mode with the highly inelegant name "All Random One Site". This appears to be designed as a fast-paced, highly reactive mode, with players spawning as random characters and battling in small, closed off areas of each map.

The last major change Riot highlights is to Match Making Rating, or MMR. While Riot doesn't go into too much detail here, it says the changes are designed so MMR will more accurately reflect player skill, therefore helping ensure that matches have better balance for 2026.

I certainly prefer it when shooters put the shooting front and centre, rather than relying on secondary gimmicks to power the experience, so these changes sound like the right call to me. But if these tweaks are tempting you back into Valorant, make sure your motherboard BIOS is up to date first, otherwise you might find yourself unable to play due to Riot's latest anti-cheat measures.

The changing of the year can be a time of renewal and reinvigoration, but that renewal isn't always frictionless. The new year might mean wrestling with over-ambitious resolutions, the frustration of writing the previous year whenever you're dating a document, or—in the case of Riot Games—forgetting to renew the encryption certificate for your software and leaving your game unplayable for millions of players worldwide. We've all been there.

Late on Sunday, reports started emerging on Reddit and elsewhere that players were unable to login to League of Legends, with their attempts stalling out indefinitely at the game's initial loading screen. While Riot shortly said it was "looking into the issue," players quickly narrowed in on the root of the problem after checking the client's error logs: Windows was rejecting its connection attempts because of an expired SSL certificate.

SSL—short for "Secure Sockets Layer"—is a security protocol for establishing encrypted connections between a server and client. To form an SSL connection, the client and server verify each other's SSL certificates, which are issued by trusted third-party certificate authorities and must be regularly renewed. If you're reading this article, you're using SSL right now (or technically the more recent TSL, but we're working in broad strokes): Your web browser and our website have formed a secure HTTPS connection after checking each other's credentials, verifying that the data is going to the right place and helping to avoid domain spoofing and other hazards.

The League client is essentially both a web browser and web server: It uses your PC to host web elements that it then requests for display in the client. But bafflingly, as players have deduced, it attempts to form a secure HTTPS connection for that traffic even though it's all happening on one machine. While it's an odd choice, it functioned without issue thanks to the application's hard-coded SSL certificate—until yesterday.

While traditionally issued SSL certificates are often renewed automatically by the issuing authority, the League client's hard-coded certificate meant someone at Riot would've needed to remember it required updating before its expiration date. While Riot hasn't confirmed that the neglected certificate renewal was the culprit, the signs seem pretty clear—particularly because players could solve their login issues if they set their system clock back to before the certificate's expiration.

What's delightful about this whole mishap is that Riot had the same problem 10 years ago: When players started receiving SSL certificate expiration popups on New Year's Day in 2016, Riot confirmed on Reddit that its "cert expired for the new year when it should have auto-renewed." If anyone set a reminder to stay on top of the cert renewal the next time around, those proverbial post-it notes were probably lost in the shuffle during a client update later that year.

Riot has since issued a client update to address the login difficulties, which evidently entailed setting the SSL certificate's expiration date to 2125. If we run into the same problem then, I'll do my best to report back.

A new Bloomberg report says Riot Games is currently working on an update to League of Legends, known internally as League Next, that will be the biggest in the game's history. The overhaul of League's "visual aesthetic," as Bloomberg put it, will impact characters, battle arenas, and the interface, and is aimed at making the game more welcoming for new players.

League of Legends has a reputation for being rough on newcomers, which is probably inevitable for a game that's been around for 16 years. To put that in perspective, you could've started playing before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and still be 10 years behind the real veterans.

That's a big hump to overcome, but Riot needs to surmount it: LoL is still one of the biggest and most successful videogames on the planet (the 2025 Worlds had a base prize pool of $5 million) but the existing player base is getting older and there aren't a lot of newbies jumping in.

The continued success of League is vital to Riot, because it's struggled on other fronts: In early 2024 it laid off 530 employees and closed Riot Forge, the initiative it launched in 2019 to make singleplayer League of Legends games in partnership with external studios. The games that emerged from that program, including Ruined King, Mageseeker, Bandle Tale, Song of Nunu, and Convergence, were generally well received but failed to attract significant audiences.

Another round of layoffs at Riot followed in October, as Riot co-founder Marc Merrill indicated that the studio was looking back to its foundational MOBA for future success. "This isn't about reducing headcount to save money," Merrill said at the time. "It's about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond. While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League."

After the Bloomberg report went out, Riot posted a video that didn't exactly deny what was in it. Pointedly entitled "A look at some of our plans for League after 2026," the video has executive producer Paul "Pabro" Bellezza and head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon acknowledging that the studio has "been working on some bigger updates to League."

"For starters, we're making a brand-new around-game client that's fully integrated with the in-game experience, rather than being a separate application like today," van Roon says. Bellezza then jumps in to say, "We're also revamping Summoner's Rift with entirely new visuals, and a bit of new gameplay," and then adds, pointedly, that Riot is "overhauling the new player experience, so that once we're done, it should be the best time ever to get your friends into League."

It definitely isn't a comprehensive look at what's coming in some post-2026 timeframe, but it does sound very much like it will be very big indeed. Whether it succeeds in attracting new players to League, or merely annoys the existing old-timers, is an entirely separate question, and the irony is that Riot's co-domination of the MOBA space, alongside Valve's Dota 2, has made life extremely difficult for newcomers. Supervive, developed by a team of Riot veterans and released just five months ago, announced earlier this week that it will close down in February; Seekers of Skyveil had an even shorter lifespan, Gigantic: Rampage Edition has literally zero players on Steam, and Amazon recently opted to sell March of Giants to Ubisoft rather than release it. League of Legends may be aging out, but whether there's an appetite for some kind of 'League 2.0' remains to be seen.

If you have an Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, or ASRock motherboard, you need to update the BIOS if you want to continue playing Valorant. That's because a critical flaw was recently found that allows cheaters to bypass hardware-based security checks and potentially inject code before Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat can wake up.

As laid out in the Riot Games blog (via Tom's Hardware), Valorant relies on IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit) to check the ID of your memory and only allow greenlit devices to get access.

In the BIOS/firmware, your motherboard has Pre-Boot DMA Protection, which uses IOMMU to prevent a rogue device from accessing your system as it boots up. This means, once you're into the operating system, your device assumes all is good and continues as normal.

The blog post says, "In some cases, hardware manufacturer firmwares incorrectly signaled to the operating system that this feature was fully active, when it was actually failing to initialize the IOMMU correctly during early boot."

This means someone getting in before those security functions boot up can effectively bypass the security, and "by the time the system is fully loaded, it can’t be 100% confident that 0 integrity breaking code was injected via DMA." This flaw was shared with manufacturers, and updates will be rolling out going forward.

If you attempt to play Valorant on a system without the new updates, you will receive a VAN: Restriction—effectively stating that your rig isn't too dissimilar to those of a potential cheater.

Riot says, "BIOS updates aren't exactly as exciting as looking at ban numbers, but this is a necessary step in our arms race against hardware cheats". We don't yet know how long bad actors have been using this technique to cheat at Valorant, and the game being free-to-play already removes one of the biggest barriers to entry for reoffenders.

If you're looking to get information on your motherboard and how to update, you can find a handy list of the security advisories below.

• Case VU#382314
• Asus Security Advisory (CVE-2025-11901)
• Gigabyte Security Advisory (CVE‑2025‑14302)
• MSI Security Advisory (CVE-2025-14303)
• Asrock Security Advisory (CVE-2025-14304)

Asus warned motherboard owners of the same problem this week, as it will affect even those lucky enough not to play Valorant, though it does require local access to actually have any effect.

Still, a reminder to update your BIOS and an assurance of fewer cheaters in a single blog post is certainly not a bad way to end the year for Riot. Though users who dislike their anti-cheat software rustling around in their PC's underlying firmware might not be too happy.

The League of Legends community is in an uproar following a recent patch that added alternative keyboard controls to the popular MOBA. Developer Riot Games released an update on December 3 that brought WASD support to certain game modes, echoing Path of Exile 2's embrace of more actiony controls in what has traditionally been a mouse-driven style of game.

While that change proved to be a great success in Path of Exile's sequel, it hasn't gone quite so smoothly for Riot, with initial fears that it would unbalance the game now mostly giving way to the opposite problem: players complaining that the controls suck to use.

When Riot announced the change in a blog post in August, it framed it as a way to make the game more approachable. “We’ve seen that for new players, WASD is the most familiar control scheme for PC games today, and let’s be real, a lot of us instinctively put our fingers there when coming back to League after playing something else,” the developer said. “By offering WASD as an alternate control scheme, we believe League will feel more intuitive to some players who come from other games.”

Soon after the announcement, players were already spiraling into doomsday scenarios decrying the decision from Riot, and the early feedback was concerning. Marc "Caedrel" Lamont, a streamer and assistant coach of the professional team Los Ratones, tried the WASD controls during a closed testing period and compared them to playing the game with “aim assist" in a stream.

“If you play on WASD, you already have Master to Grand Master level spacing,” Caedrel said. “All you have to do is hold the directional keys you want to run in … and you hold your mouse right-click on top of the enemy champion. That’s it. Then your character will automatically run away and hit on every single attack speed that it has.”

Caedrel suggested that WASD would make precise spacing and landing attacks far easier than with mouse-click movement, meaning certain roles like attack damage carries would stand to strongly benefit. In reality, early impressions claim the implementation of WASD is quite the opposite—the keyboard movement comes at a major cost for the minn-maxxing types. WASD players can't use animation cancelling to their full advantage for extra auto attacks, making the classic setup is better for the more competitive.

After that initial round of testing, it seems Riot imposed a slight attack speed nerf on the WASD setup. That's a big deal for the whole roster, but it's an extra nasty penalty for speedy champions like Jinx or Twitch (the rat, not the streaming platform). On the League subreddit, poster J0rdian shared their admittedly imperfect science for comparing the two control schemes and claimed "WASD has substantial DPS loss, especially at higher attack speeds."

The recently updated PBE (public beta) release had most folks reporting the same conclusion, leading to Reddit threads questioning "Is everyone complaining about WASD for nothing?" And, well, it sort of sounds that way.

Others like WanderingRin got a little deeper with their explanation:"They stopped it from auto canceling and they implemented an artificial attack speed nerf. Now you have to hit 0 movement inputs while the attack is playing out and only input one when it's cancelable. On top of that it's still nerfed at higher attack speeds."

On X, Riot senior tech game producer Darcy Ludington highlighted a video that seems to address the potential for WASD play to compete with classic controls while also explaining why it feels slower.

"You can avoid the delay between autos by releasing WASD keys before the attack fires and alternating movement ->attack->movement," wrote HydroZenith in a quote response. "You can get into a good rhythm to succeed, props to this player for figuring it out so quickly!"

Perhaps the early feedback really sunk in and Riot did some major surgery, but regardless it's not the WASD doomsday scenario some imagined. Did the developer overcompensate? Maybe—there are, of course, some players now complaining that WASD isn't good enough, but it's clearly going to take an adjustment period for both players and Riot's balance team to assess the impact. The control scheme isn't even available yet in Ranked play where it's sure to come under the most scrutiny.

"It'll be more than a month before we communicate out the outcomes, mainly as WASD is one piece of the pie for new players," Ludington wrote on X. "We have tested it already though with new players and did see it was one of the major barriers to trying LoL out."

Trading Card Games are in an odd place. They're probably more popular than ever, with more playing them than ever. Given Magic: The Gathering's recent big focus on crossover events, which makers of Wizards of the Coast keep reporting as being phenomenally successful, they're probably making more money than ever.

At the same time TCGs are still competing for attention with the last decade's huge growth in the resurgent board game, miniatures wargame, and roleplaying game communities. They're also sharing space with digital card games, which give many people the strategic experience of playing a TCG without the social one.

But Magic's still a juggernaut, with only two long-term competitors really sticking around: The Pokémon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh, neither of which are actual threats to Magic's throne. In Pokémon's case simply because its audience is by necessity either younger or—in many cases—simply speculatively collecting rather than properly playing. Because it's people actually showing up and playing the game every week that makes it have staying power and value long-term. The wisdom would be that it's hard to compete well enough with Magic that you'll actually survive in the world of TCGs, and the road from the '90s is littered with literally hundreds of dead ones that didn't measure up.

So the conventional wisdom would tell Riot Games not to publish Riftbound: The League of Legends card game—but they have, and perhaps the hunger is actually there this time. Their initial print run, despite a few errors, has vanished off shelves and is being scalped at incredible rates. The League of Legends name, the decade-plus driving force of Riot's success, has clearly got enough cachet to punch into the TCG market. Whether it has the staying power to stick with it is another question entirely—to do well it'll have to attract people who aren't solely interested in LoL, but TCG hardliners who're in it to show up and play the game at their local multiple times a month, or travel to conventions for tournaments. That's the kind of loyalty that makes TCGs succeed.

I think that Riftbound might have the juice to succeed in the current TCG space because of how it's played. It's a game-first approach that tailors the rules to how people most enjoy playing TCGs right now.

A match of Riftbound uses a 40-card deck that focuses on a single one of League of Legends' many Champions, who add their own unique cards representing themselves and their abilities from two of Riftbound's six Domains—the colors and theme of the cards you play and the rune resources you draw power from. Decks can't have cards that don't fit their core Champion. Like most modern TCGs, the deck doesn't include the resource you draw power from—those come into play two at a time, every turn, from a 12-card deck of colored runes. To play cards they're either temporarily exhausted or sent back to their draw pile as you play cards.

So far so good, right? If you play Magic you almost certainly recognize two elements that are important here because they're key to the popular Commander format. In Commander, you quickly and pretty reliably gain (and sometimes lose) resources to play cards with, and your entire deck is built around the identity and theme of a single character. It's commonly played very socially in multiplayer "pods" that vary from place to place.

Problematically for Magic, Commander is played with a 100-card deck that doesn't work with Magic's competitive formats, and some players even complain of it driving down interest in Magic's competitive 60-card formats. For these players, between the format conflict and the sometimes-unwelcome crossover events, Magic is fighting itself.

Riftbound, on the other hand, uses the one-deck format for its entire current ruleset, which is designed from the ground up to work in two-player duels, two-on-two team games, and four-player free for alls. It's designed so that the same decks you use for your social multiplayer format are also suited—or at least compatible with—more competitive play. It's also designed such that I think you could even play draft or sealed formats with that same flexibility. (Clutch for retaining players like me, who enjoy plopping down money on the exciting uncertainty of a sealed event but don't really want to collect.)

I might add, after playing a dozen matches of Riftbound, it actually does seem to work well that way. It's naturally scaling, with players fighting for control of battlefields that their own deck brings to the table each match. Controlling a battlefield brings points, and points bring victory, but the basic mechanics of Riftbound mean that only two players at a time can contest a battlefield, with an attacker either taking it over or retreating by the end of their turn. There are also relatively limited windows when you can play cards that react to or alter combats between units, but you can still invite chaos by bringing outside players into any given two-person conflict. In short, the madcap complexity of Magic-style priority rules and turns and phases don't come up nearly as often.

I never felt like I needed a judge at my own home game table, but I did come across plenty of interesting corner cases that required a look at the rules. In short, even when it's complicated and the choices are interesting, the overall format is fairly simple. It's a clear sign that Riftbound's core rules and initial sets were designed for both casual and competitive play.

What also makes me think that Riftbound could pull it off is that I don't question Riot's ability to push a good tabletop game. Their 2016 board game release Mechs vs. Minions was a damn good game. It hasn't been reprinted recently, and sells for several times its original price on the secondary market. Similarly, Riftbound primary publisher UVS has managed to keep their other card games alive in the crowded, cutthroat market.

But it's good enough that even if Riftbound doesn't take off it may well develop a cult community that keeps playing it—like the much-bereaved Android: Netrunner or killed-then-revived miniatures game Heroscape. For my part, I'll be watching Riftbound progress with interest. If they can keep up the pace of interesting game design, good releases, and meet demand they'll have a strong start. If they can draw interested players from other card games, especially ones who don't know jack about League of Legends' many characters, then I think they might be onto something.

Hytale, up until this point, has been one of gaming's biggest messes. Announced back in 2018, Hytale looked like it was about to waltz in and start tidily eating Mojang's lunch. Riot even saw promise in the studio, acquiring it in 2020. Seven years later, scope creep and an apparently ill-advised engine rewrite caused Riot to call curtains on the whole thing.

Hypixel's co-founder at the time wrote: "Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found that Hytale still wasn’t as far along as it needed to be."

What looked like the executioner's axe for ol' Hytale, though, might well have been its salvation. Riot sold the game's rights back to Simon Collins-Laflamme, the studio's original co-founder, passing the torch from Noxy back to Laflamme to go "back to the original vision for Hytale."

You might think that "original vision" would take some considerable time to cobble together, but it turns out, er, no. There's enough meat on this bone for a 16-minute gameplay video to just… be released. As the description states, "No bells or whistles. Just the game as it is. Raw and broken, but still beautiful."

And if we're being honest, I think "raw and broken" is a little harsh. What I'm looking at here feels like a completely serviceable, competent-seeming survival RPG with some honestly quite pretty world generation. Combat looks fluid and involved, if a little floaty at times, but on the whole I'm almost not sure what the melodrama was about.

I'll take Laflamme's word for it that Hytale is rough around the edges, but—and this may well have been the problem—plenty of games, particularly those in this genre, release with humble scopes and build from there once they've got support. I'm a bit of an early access cynic, and even I'm surprised Riot didn't give it a whirl with what I can see here.

Laflamme did this, in his own words, to break Hytale's long streak of low communication: "I promised players videos, screenshots and blog posts. One day after the acquisition, I’m keeping that promise. Now that you’ve seen the first gameplay footage in a long time, I’m heading back to work on the early access launch. The team will share more clips and screenshots as we go.

"It mattered to me to release raw footage today so we break the curse once and for all."

Based on this footage, and Laflamme's seemingly ironclad conviction, we're likely to get news on Hytale's early access period soon. For real, this time.

Five months after cancelling the development of Hytale and closing the studio working on it, Riot Games has sold the whole thing back to original co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme. And yes, that means work on the game has resumed: Collins-Laflamme said more than 30 former developers "who know this game inside and out" have been brought back to continue development, and more are expected to follow soon.

"We are thrilled to announce that we have acquired Hytale from Riot Games," Collins-Laflamme wrote in a new update on the Hytale website.

"While it didn't make sense for them to continue developing it in its existing form, they ultimately wanted what's best for players, and that's for us to eventually play a revised version of the game. We are grateful to Riot Games for making this possible."

Riot confirmed the same in its own post on X, saying the sale will give the Hytale community "its best shot at experiencing a revised version of the game."

"At Riot, our commitment is always to players first—ensuring that the choices we make, even when they’re difficult, reflect what we believe will create the most positive outcome for them," Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja said. "While at Riot, the Hytale team made a ton of incredible content and while this means Hytale’s journey will continue outside of Riot, we’re hopeful this transition provides a way for the community that has been so passionate and patient over the years to experience some of the great work that was done.”

The resurrected development team is "fully independent and personally committed to funding Hytale for the next 10 years," Collins-Laflamme wrote in today's Hytale update, adding that they're "going back to the original vision for Hytale."

That "vision for Hytale" has been a point of contention over the years. Hytale was first revealed in 2018, and two years later the Hypixel Studios team was acquired by Riot. But a planned early access release in 2021 failed to materialize, and further delays followed until the cancellation. Hypixel co-founder Noxy, who served as studio CEO under Riot, said the delays were in part down to mission creep: "Over time, as our vision evolved and the genre matured around us, the bar kept rising. Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found that Hytale still wasn’t as far along as it needed to be. It became clear we’d need a lot more time to get it to a place where it could support the ambitious vision for the game."

In a post on X, Noxy said he's "extremely grateful that players will get to play Hytale," and thanked Collins-Laflamme for bringing it back to life. Collins-Laflamme replied by thanking Noxy for all the work he'd put into the game over the years, and "for helping support the deal that brought the project back home today." It's also clear, however, that Noxy won't be one of the rehired developers.

A few ideas for how to save Hytale were flung around shortly after it was cancelled: Some people hoped Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone would step in, and Anego Studios entertained the possibility of using the property for a new Vintage Story game mode.

But it was Collins-Laflamme who really came out swinging, saying a week after it was cancelled that he believes in Hytale so much he'd put down $25 million of his own money—presumably earned by selling Hytale to Riot in the first place—to finish it. He also committed to reaching out to Riot about a possible sale, and here we are.

How much he actually forked over to take back Hytale wasn't revealed, and Collins-Laflamme isn't alone in the venture: The acquisition announcement names fellow Hypixel co-founder Philippe Touchette as "co-funding" the project; Touchette is also "overseeing financial responsibility, and helping structure the finances for the acquisition."

Further good news fans is that they should have their hands on it relatively soon. Collins-Laflamme warned, however, that Hytale in its current state is "messy," "janky," and that "there's a lot of work to be done." Still, the plan is to release it "as soon as possible," presumably in some early access form, and take it from there.

"It won’t be perfect on day one," Collins-Laflamme wrote. "My hope is that together, we’ll shape it into something truly special."

Steam went offline earlier today in an odd but thankfully brief hitch that may have been a small part of a much bigger thing: Xbox, PlayStation, Riot Games, and Epic all suffered a very sudden spike in outage reports at around the same time last night, and that's led to speculation that it might be part of a massive DDoS targeting online game services.

As seen in outage reports on Downdetector, the timing is awfully coincidental.

Steam:

Epic Games Store:

PlayStation Network:

Xbox Live:

League of Legends:

Valorant:

Fortnite:

At a little before 11 pm ET on October 6, Riot reported "game disconnection issues" on its League of Legends and Valorant status pages. Those status reports remain active for now. Shortly before that, reports of Steam and Riot being hit with a DDoS attack also began to surface on Reddit and social media.

Steam being DDOS'd from r/DotA2

As reported by Cybernews, there's some speculation that the attack was launched via the massive Airsuru botnet. A PC Mag report says the Aisuru botnet was determined to be the source of a "hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks twice as large as anything seen on the internet before" reported by Cloudflare in September.

It's not clear why Steam would be hit with subsequent attacks while the other services were spared, and in fact the execution of a large-scale DDoS attack against multiple gaming services is entirely unconfirmed at this point, although the timing and scale of the problems pretty strongly suggests that there's more than just a whole lot of bad luck going around. In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Riot Games spokesman Joe Hixson acknowledged that something is going on, across multiple companies, but didn't speculate on the underlying cause.

"We can confirm that our teams have been working to resolve intermittent network issues affecting our games over the past ~36 hours," Hixson said. "Like many companies over the last day or two, we've faced challenges to network stability and taken proactive steps to protect the player experience. We've temporarily disabled ranked queues in some regions and enabled ranked points loss compensation where appropriate. For the latest status, players can check directly in each game client. We appreciate everyone's patience while we work to get things fully back to normal."

As for why this is happening, that's a matter of conjecture too, but the most common assumption seems to be a simple one: It's a demonstration of power. "An important part of selling your product is a proof of its capabilities," redditor paulHarkonen wrote in the Steam subreddit. "This is a great way to demonstrate you can take down even resilient targets."

2XKO's closed beta seems to be going pretty well, with the tag fighter throwing open the doors to the masses on October 7. Despite executive producer Tom Cannon saying in July that "our goal is to keep the game up, online, and available" from the closed beta's launch, it seems that Riot needs just a few days to get everything straightened out.

A post on the 2XKO X account reads: "We need a little more time to get early access up and running, so we'll be shutting down closed beta a few days early on Oct 3 @ 9pm PT." Servers will be back up and running in time for the early access launch on October 7 at 8am PT/11am ET/4pm BST.

Riot says that offline mode will still work, so players should still be able to hit the lab, play local multiplayer, and face off against CPUs. Three-and-a-half days to do some tinkering behind the scenes is nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially when I think about other fighting games who took their betas offline and straight-up vanished for a year—looking at you, Multiversus.

The downtime news was released alongside a trailer for 2XKO's tenth champion, verifiable League mascot Teemo. And as someone who doesn't play the MOBA, I finally understand all of the Teemo hate.

Riot has really leaned into the gremlin vibes here, with Teemo being an all-out terror as both a zoner and a trap character, using his signature blow darts and mushrooms to create space while also laying down grass patches that he can quickly teleport to for some solid mixups.

The trailer is steeped in self-awareness in the best possible way. Halfway through sees a fake Twitch-like chat appear with comments like "2XKO SAVED," "this game is cooked" and various iterations of cringe/based. Riot knows of Teemo's crimes, and is doing everything it can to lean into that.

It even ends with a reference to Evo Moment 37—one of the most iconic FGC moments that continues to haunt Justin Wong over 20 years later—which, if I wasn't already sold on the sheer tomfoolery Teemo had been displaying in the two minutes prior to this, I certainly am now.

Just a couple weeks out from its early access release on October 7, League of Legends fighting game 2XKO's director is giving players a fair warning that the spin-off might not be perfect—not because it's rife with issues, but because Riot wants to try out new ideas with its first foray into the genre. So, while things might get off to a rocky start, issues will get smoothed out as those ideas are refined.

As reported by GamesRadar, in an interview with Edge Magazine, 2XKO director Shaun Rivera commented on Riot's hopes (and fears) for the game, stating, "We're the type of team where we want to try stuff. Sometimes it's going to land and sometimes it's going to whiff, but we will be trying things. I want to set those expectations for players that something we try might go wrong or it might not be good, but we'll address it."

Rivera also noted that "it's going to be a little bumpy when we get out," although that's to be expected with any early access game. Even if 2XKO wasn't in early access, though, Rivera makes the case for a little leeway, adding, "I do want to call out, though, that we're a team of people making a fighting game for the first time in a sense, and we don't have older fighting-game animations to reuse or things like that.

"We're making our champions from scratch, and we're learning as we make them... we've got a lot of champions at various stages of development down the pipe that I can't wait for people to see and play."

This touches on one of the biggest criticisms of 2XKO so far: its limited number of playable characters. It's great to see favorites like Vi, Jinx, and Ekko in the closed beta, but players are clamoring to see more champions added to the roster. Luckily, it sounds like plenty more are on the way. 2XKO will be free-to-play when it launches in early access on PC next month, with solo or duo play and ranked matches.

It's been almost six years and one name change, but 2XKO (formerly Project L) finally opened its doors as part of a closed beta earlier this month. If you've been one of the unlucky folk begging all your mates for an invite code to no avail, don't fret: the tag fighter is throwing open the gate to all players much sooner than I expected.

Riot just revealed that 2XKO will officially enter early access on October 7. No more closed beta, no more invite codes. The bad news is that it's still a PC-only deal—despite our PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S pals being included back in the 2024 beta, they're still being left out of the main event for now. There's no word on when the game'll go multi-platform just yet, unfortunately.

But for those of us on PC, early access marks the start of 'Season 0' as well as the debut of 2XKO's 10th champion, which Riot is still keeping firmly under wraps. Well, it's trying anyway. A datamine of the game's upcoming battle pass included a graphic of Braum, Yasuo, and Darius sporting new costumes alongside a picture of rat mascot Teemo. The latter of whom isn't exactly in the game yet.

The official 2XKO X account responded to the datamine with a cheeky "how'd that get in there," which doesn't exactly smack of denial. Riot is keeping mum on the whole thing right now, but whoever it is will be playable right from the early access launch.

Riot also says that anything obtained during early access—like cosmetics, champs, and mastery rewards—will carry over when the full game launches at some point in the future. Looking to 2026, Riot says the next year will see five additional seasons, each one coming with a new champion and cosmetic rewards. That should hopefully fill out the roster quite nicely—for a tag fighter, I'd consider 2XKO to be a little on the thin side right now when it comes to character numbers.

And of course it's a fighting game, which means Riot is already gearing up to turn it into an all-out competitive spectacle. 2XKO will debut at EVO France—taking place just a few days after early access launch—with Riot chucking a little extra money into the prize pots across 22 upcoming tournaments.

I appreciate the developer's emphasis on the tournaments still being community-led while plumping the prize pot from afar, especially in the wake of sportswashing concerns with the Esports World Cup and the recent takeover of EVO by the Saudi Arabia city of Qiddiya. I think it's the right balance, one I hope Riot continues to take as 2XKO makes the tournament circuit rounds.

Leaks are part and parcel of a videogame's development at this point. Do I agree with that? Of course not, but you'd be hard pressed to find a big game that hasn't sprung a little leak here and there at some point. Sometimes it's dataminers getting their hands on a beta, or in more unfortunate cases (like GTA 6), it's a big ol' hack job.

Sometimes, though, the call comes from inside the house. That's exactly what happened in the case of 2XKO—Riot's upcoming League of Legends tag fighter—when an unannounced character showed up on the developer's goddamn support page of all places.

Could be fake but the art style is so distinctive 2xko that I fell for it. from r/2XKO

Big robot lad Blitzcrank was spotted as the featured mascot for the 2XKO support on Riot's site earlier this week, with the art style most definitely fitting in with the game.

Speculation started to whip up soon after, and the support site graphic was quickly swapped out for one of Jinx instead. The damage was already done, though, and 2XKO Editor-in-Chief Ben Forbes retweeted this 2022 post from the Street Fighter 6 account: "As residents of Metro City, we've all seen things we weren't supposed to see, but we're all in this together. We appreciate all the positive reactions. Thank you for the support!"

That statement came after the entire roster for Street Fighter 6 was leaked, making it pretty clear at this point that Blitzcrank's appearance was an accident. Soon after, the 2XKO account essentially threw its hands up and said "oopsie!" when it posted: "commencing accidental leak protocol," adding: "Blitzcrank is 2XKO's ninth champion, available in closed beta. Full reveal Sept 2".

I gotta say, I appreciate Riot coming out and saying it. I suppose there wasn't exactly much to lose—it's only one fighter, it was the developer's own fault, and there was little point in hiding it at that point. Considering Blitzcrank is going to be part of the launch roster anyway, it seems the secret spilt only a few days early, too.

I'm not much of a League player, but I do love a fighting game, and I'm excited to learn more about Blitzcrank. I don't usually gravitate towards big bodies in fighters, but I do enjoy seeing what they can do, and with a bunch of players hoping that he's a grappler, I'm eagerly anticipating Riot's deep dive into his kit.

Mondays—who needs 'em. I'm not having a particularly great one, myself. But I'm enjoying it far more now, as I've just found out that a bunch of Riot's big bosses had to get up on stage at a leadership meeting and figure out what "gooning" meant.

That's per gameplay director on LoL spinoff Teamfight Tactics, Steven Mortimer, who—in a recent livestream (spotted by our friends at GamesRadar+) said: "I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm going to tell you this and if Riot gets mad at me for it, that's fine."

"At the leadership thing I was at, I am not kidding, at one point on stage, they were talking about how they didn't know what the word 'goon' meant, and then they started explaining what gooning meant. That was a real thing that happened."

In an industry ruled by the iron fist of growth, filled with live-service after live-service, there's a small, tiny, chaotic part of my ruined heart that's very pleased. We have all collectively managed to be so comprehensively unhinged online that we have forced Riot to acknowledge a synonym for masturbation in an honest-to-goon leadership meeting.

It's not like Riot's the only one getting grilled, mind. Marvel Rivals had to bat off the gooner accusations recently. And it's no real secret that games have yawed hard back into sex appeal—which I've got no real issue with, as long as it's equal-opportunity.

Besides, Riot's gone on the record to say that it sells "skins to make things like Arcane", so if the, uh, self-indulgence helps fund some of the best animation we've seen in recent years, I'm all for it. I can hardly turn my nose up and claim moral superiority when these companies are simply meeting demand with supply.

"The context was fine, and it was funny, and whatever," says Mortimer. "But out-of-context, it was hilarious." I'll say.

After almost 16 years of pointing and clicking, League of Legends is trying something a little different by adding the option to move around with WASD instead.

In a video detailing the upcoming control scheme—complete with an abhorrent pronunciation of WASD (who the hell says waz-dee? You heathens)---executive producer Paul Bellezza said that traditional League movement can often be a barrier of entry. "We found that a lot of new or returning players struggle a lot with League's controls early on," he said. "Click to move just isn't the sort of control scheme they're used to, and it puts a lot of people off including many that we believe would otherwise really love the game."

Bellezza said that introducing WASD movement as an alternative should "help get new players to the fun parts of League faster and with less friction."

Producer for WASD/Wazdee Darcy Ludington echoed the sentiment: "Ultimately our goal with WASD is to make playing League more intuitive for first-time players or those returning, without changing what makes League, League." She iterated that striking a careful balance between both keyboard and mouse movement was important, with Riot "working hard to ensure that both control schemes feel great across all ranks, champions, and modes."

Designer Dean Ayala noted that the team has been testing the control scheme across an internal team, new players, and pros in order to try and fine-tune the option. It'll be hitting the PBE first "in the next few patches," with Ayala and Ludington saying that WASD'll hang around in there for "an extended run" to "catch any bugs, unintended interactions, and to ensure that your ranked games aren't disrupted by someone WASDing into walls."

It seems Riot doesn't want one control scheme reigning supreme over the other, with Ayala continuing to hammer home about the importance of balance: "Our goal is to make sure WASD is an awesome way to play League for the players who want it, but no-one should feel forced to switch control schemes just to stay competitive." As an example, Ludington noted that kiting while attacking with point-and-click controls takes "serious precision", with WASD potentially lowering that skill ceiling significantly.

The community reactions seems fairly on the negative about it right now, with some folk comparing it to playing an FPS with a keyboard and mouse versus using a controller with aim assist: "This WASD change is going to ruin League like mixed lobbies have ruined FPS games," one Reddit commenter said, while another stated "They're never not gonna be unequal."

One comment called the introduction of WASD "a major blunder," writing: "I have not seen a single person in favor of this, a lot of changes made I can see a reasoning for but this one I can't find a single reason. This is undoubtedly the stupidest decision I could see possible with the most flawed logic I've seen."

It's understandable to an extent. Folk have years and thousands of hours of built-up muscle memory developed and skill expression is an important factor. Feeling some type of way over a new addition muscling in and threatening to cause you to relearn everything in order to keep up is valid, and it's not the first time in recent memory where veteran players of a game have faced friction with a developer's desire to broaden its appeal to reel in newbies.

Ultimately it's going to be difficult to gauge just how drastic an implementation it is until the thing's actually hit the PBE. With a patch every few weeks we can probably expect it to hit sometime in September, and I'll be interested in coming back to see what people think once they've managed to get their hands on our four beloved movement keys for themselves.

Tag fighters are back, baby. Or at least they're going to be back. At some point. After a verifiable dearth of the things for a good long while, Riot came out swinging in February 2024 by renaming Project L to the still-questionable 2XKO and revealing that it was going to be a 2v2 dukeout.

But just like buses, bad things, good things, and celebrity deaths, it turns out tag fighters also come in threes: Summer Game Fest saw the reveal of InvincibleVS—from a brand-new studio formed out of a lotta Killer Instinct folk—and Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls from veteran 2D fighter studio Arc System Works, the latter of which is going extra balls-to-the-wall by making its game a freakin' 4v4. That's a lot of characters to lab.

Are any of these actually out and playable yet? No (though 2XKO is almost there) but it does give fighting game fans a whole lot to be excited about. The sudden uptick hasn't gone unnoticed by the FGC either, and IGN recently asked 2XKO lead Alex Jaffe what he thought about the sudden resurgence. Jaffe joked that the game was already "the old new kid on the block" despite not even being released yet.

"Honestly, it's exciting in a real way, because everybody on this team loves tag fighters, and there were a real jerk of options for a while," He added. "And we're making this game because we think that this is one of the most mind-meltingly enjoyable experiences you could have on planet Earth.

"And so we're genuinely psyched that there are more options out there and that there are going to be more people playing tag fighters on account of multiple games coming out. And it's really cool just seeing them, everyone's taking very different takes on them."

Jaffe, who was at EVO alongside a playable version of 2XKO, even managed to find a little bit of time to sniff out the competition.

"The Tōkon folks were super nice and welcomed us in to play this morning," he said, noting that he had "a great time." Jaffe was also quick to note: "The game's very different than ours. The pacing is different. The way team play works is different."

That doesn't particularly surprise me. Like I said, 2XKO works in teams of two while Tōkon has decided to double its team size in comparison. That's gonna create some pretty different pacing—how much health everyone has, how long rounds take, strategy and synergy—I would have been more surprised if the two were identical.

Continuing his diplomacy, Jaffe said "I think there's room to enjoy both of them, or just different audiences that will like different ones. So I feel great about that. I haven't got to play Invincible. Yeah, super excited to play that."

Now I'm not much of a League of Legends or superhero girlie, but I'm still pretty damn excited to dive into a new generation of tag fighters. I'm sure for some it might even be their first time giving the genre a whirl, and Jaffe seems jazzed about that possibility.

"I think it's inevitably going to bring a lot of people into this kind of peak experience," he said. "So we're excited, and we want people to play our game, and enjoy, and in general, to play tag games to enjoy them."

We have a lot to thank security researchers for. Between uncovering yet more vulnerabilities in Google Chrome, and exposing an embarrassing data leak in a popular sex toy app (no, really), these white hat hackers tend to make our digital existence safer in the long run. Surely some compensation from the multi-million dollar corporations caught in a virtually compromising position is the least these techies could ask for?

Security researcher Renwa recently found a number of high severity vulnerabilities affecting Apple's Safari browser and Sequoia OS. This included an absolute doozy that could've allowed bad actors to bypass Same Origin Policy in a UXSS (Universal Cross-site Scripting) style attack. Despite this vulnerability being so severe it enjoyed the dubious honour of a 9.8 (critical) CVSS score, Renwa say they were only paid $1,000 for reporting the issue to Apple.

Apple gave credit where credit is due with regards to their security update for Safari 18.4, crediting Renwa for finding a number of issues and explaining they've since addressed CVE-2025-30466 specifically through "improved state management."

However, the reward feels like a small sum for spotting an issue that could've exposed an untold number of Apple users to hackers, especially when you consider the fact $1,000 doesn't even cover rent in a number of US cities. In their post on X, Renwa quips, "I should quit this bug bounty thing and get a real job."

Rent anxiety aside, $1,000 is especially low considering Apple has placed a bounty of up to $1 million for the finding of other flaws, such as vulnerabilities within its Private Cloud Compute servers. So, it's hardly the case that Apple is stingy overall. Then there's the fact Google recently awarded $1,000 to security researchers uncovering a number of medium and low severity Chrome vulnerabilities, with some even netting upwards of $2,000 for these relatively less critical issues. With this in mind, it's especially baffling that a vulnerability rated as high as 9.8 would be deemed such low value by Apple.

Speaking of, let's take a tour through some of the bug bounties offered by various other major players. For instance back in 2021, Valve awarded one white hat hacker $7,500 for reporting a Steam Wallet infinite funds flaw. Almost a decade earlier the same company had paid another security researcher $20,000 for highlighting an exploit that allowed hackers to generate all the Steam keys they could ever want.

And it's not just Valve with a track record of putting its money where its mouth is: Back in 2022, Rockstar awarded $10,000 to a GTA Online player that helped fix the game's slow loads. And then last year, Riot announced an especially beefy bounty for anyone who could find holes in Valorant's Vanguard anticheat (though admittedly this was intended more as a show of confidence in their own tech than paying security researchers what they're worth).

But Renwa isn't the only one getting undercut as of late. Remember the Lovense leak I mentioned up top? The core issue was reported and partially fixed multiple times over the years, but security researcher @Krissy was only paid $350 when they discovered the issue back in September 2023. According to BobDaHacker, their group of security researchers then saw $3,000 in total for reporting the same core issue years later.

Considering that all it takes to spell disaster for businesses both big and small is one correctly guessed password or a particularly nasty ransomware attack, I for one think it wouldn't hurt to more consistently pay security researchers what they're worth.

"Hey folks, yesterday we posted a creator-made video on our official Weibo channel that, frankly, did not hit the mark. When we post content on our official channels, it's on us to maintain a high quality bar and be clear about where it came from. Thank you for all the feedback, we can and will do better."

I'm not entirely sure that "creator-made" is the right term here, and the statement is very boilerplate, but it's clear the video somehow slipped past Riot's quality control. Original story follows.

Riot's gone and embarrassed itself, again. As spotted by both AroushTheKween on X, and later immortalised on the Wild Rift subreddit, the Weibo account for Wild Rift's Chinese release (which took some time to arrive after it was released elsewhere) posted a horrible AI-generated pile of slop to 'celebrate' the game's third anniversary. The video's since been removed, but it's been corroborated that it had been posted to Weibo, and was still viewable for a short while before it was taken down.

Wild rift china version got backlash. from r/wildrift

There are times when I fear for our AI-driven future, it's true. But there are other times when a tepid puddle of dogwater like this gets dropped, and I feel a little better—sure, generative AI is scary, but when a company cuts corners to put artists out of a job, it's clear the people they leave in charge are incapable of not immediately pantsing themselves.

This video has so many glaring issues wrong with it, it's hard to imagine how it passed anyone's desk. Let me just go ahead and list some of the ones I noticed:

• The "r" on the opening shot of "3rd anniversary" is melting.
• Anniversary is also spelled with one n.
• Seraphine punts a bunch of minions with her heels. I guess she was on vocal rest.
• Jinx is using a gat straight out of Modern Warfare.
• Her rocket launcher, Fishbones, can't decide whether it's a flamethrower or a laser cannon.
• Jinx's tattoos just cannot stay consistent.
• In one shot, Aurora's tail emerges from the middle of her spine. In other shots, it's just missing entirely.
• Ezra's goggles keep melting.
• A wide-shot of the crowd has a ring of lights suspended from mid-air, also melting like a Salvador Dali clock.
• The song is atrocious.

I'd also like to point out the unnerving similarities to Sony's very good KPop Demon Hunters in terms of whatever the hell this model was trained on—particularly the latter half of "How It's Done" and its crowd shots. Obviously, AI models are useful for plagiarists in that they can be vague about what data they've snatched, but I would bet good money that "in the style of KPop Demon Hunters" was used at some point.

Via the text at the end of the video, it appears "异类-Outliers" is an AI "visual production" company (here's their account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok). You can see their other "work", including a melty attempt at a live-action Evangelion. In other words, while I've reached out to Riot for comment, I can imagine this whole debacle will be chalked up to the fault of a third-party vendor—despite said third-party vendor obviously being known for producing this kind of trash.

The most frustrating part of the entire debacle, to me, is the fact that it's not like Riot is incapable of spending money on this stuff—if anything, it's a company that's known for it. K/DA took the internet by storm back in 2020, and Arcane is the result of pumping over $250 million into the animation industry, the same industry these models are now shamelessly snatching from, using models the company has spoken out about before.

Maybe it's more Tencent's fault. Either way, I'm not shocked that a big corporation doesn't have enough of a wrangle on its foreign social media pipelines—or that Riot might be surreptitiously keener about gen AI than it lets on. I'm just disappointed.

Six years ago, Riot announced it was working on a 2v2 fighting game based on League of Legends called Project L and it's been relatively tight-lipped about it ever since. It wasn't until last year that there were some signs of life when it got renamed to 2XKO and a series of YouTube videos gave us a peek at what it will look like in action.

In a new video today, we finally have confirmation that it's definitely still real and will be playable very soon.

After a short gameplay tease featuring new character Vi, executive producer Tom Cannon reassured fans that the game is still alive and well and that it will be playable in a PC-only closed beta starting on September 9.

"Closed beta marks the start of us rolling out this game for everyone," he said. "Our goal is to keep the game up, online, and available from here on out."

Cannon said the goal of the beta is to refine the "backend systems" and to expect things to "start out a little bumpy at first." He said anyone who has participated in past alpha tests will automatically be invited along with a chunk of new players too. And as time goes on, more waves of invites will go out.

2XKO will also be playable at Riot's booth during EVO 2025, which runs from August 1 to 3 in Las Vegas. There you'll be able to play Vi and tell your friends that you saw Riot's fighting game with your own eyes.

Previously, Riot had text on the site that said the game was coming in 2025, but that seems to have been removed shortly before today's announcement. Given some of the recent playtest delays, however, I doubt anyone will be surprised if it slips into next year.

You can sign up for the closed beta on the game's website.

There's been a lot of talk about resurrecting Hytale since Riot cancelled development of the Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG last week. Most of it is originating from original Hypixel Studios founder Simon Collins-Laflamme, who recently committed to reaching out to Riot to see what can be done. But there's an unexpected name in the conversation, too: Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone.

Barone's interest in Hytale came to light through a Discord message, shared on X by YouTuber Myne. "Possibly," Barone wrote in response to a user who enquired about his interest (and suggested Barone could make some money from it). "But I would have to hear more about what the plan is, why it failed initially (behind the scenes), etc."

It's a smart position to take. Hytale seemed to be progressing well even before it gained access to Riot's nigh-limitless resources, yet five years down the road it all came to naught, and the likelihood of that situation changing in the workable future was so remote that Riot opted to take a bath on the whole thing rather than pour more money into it. Asking how that happened, and how developers will turn the ship around in some hypothetical 'Hytale lives again' future, is just common sense.

These early days of efforts to 'Save Hytale' are no time to splash the cold waters of reality on your face, of course, and Barone's statement drew eyeballs and excitement. One or two die-hards even dared dream of some kind of Hulk Hogan/Mr T-style tag team-up between Barone and Collins-Laflamme.

For myself, though, a more pressing question leapt to mind: Did Barone actually say that? Yes he did, as it turns out, although he clarified in an email sent to PC Gamer that he was only responding to a question, not making any sort of public pronouncement. He also suggested, gently as is his way, that people expecting him to ride in and save the day should probably rein it in a bit.

"I'm not actively doing anything to make this happen," Barone said. "If something were presented to me, I would be open to entertaining the idea, that's all.

"It's not something I am thinking about too much, since I'm focused on working on my next game."

So Barone might be interested in helping out with the Hytale situation, but he is definitely working on Haunted Chocolatier, the game he's been on-and-off ignoring for years because he was also still working on Stardew Valley. He's gotten more serious about Haunted Chocolatier in recent months, though: In April he mused about going out to a cabin in the woods and cutting himself off from the world for two years until it's finished.

Given all that, It doesn't seem too likely to me that Barone will involve himself in Hytale—the man's hands are full enough as it is with games he's genuinely passionate about. That may be a little disappointing—a Hytale happy ending written by the man behind Stardew Valley would be pretty cool—but it's okay too, for two reasons: One, because Collins-Laflamme is serious about getting involved in the Hytale situation, and more importantly is taking concrete steps toward making it happen; and two, because it means Barone is actually seriously working on Haunted Chocolatier, and we might really get to play it someday.

The Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG Hytale is cancelled, but it's not necessarily dead. In the wake of Riot's decision to pull the plug on development last week, Hypixel Studios co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme has expressed interest in the possibility of bringing it back to life, and says he's willing to put his money—a lot of money—where his mouth is.

Hytale was revealed to the world in 2018, when it had already been in development "for several years," and developer Hypixel Studios was acquired by Riot just a couple years later. Instead of a planned 2021 release, though, numerous delays followed: Developer updates slowed to a crawl, and we never really saw anything more of it than the 2018 announcement trailer. Earlier this month, Riot finally cancelled the game, and closed Hypixel outright.

Recriminations and finger-pointing followed in the immediate wake of Hytale's cancellation, as some developers took to social media to express their frustration with internal studio management at Hypixel.

But there was also a nearly-immediate push to "save Hytale," which included outreach to Collins-Laflamme. He initially seemed reluctant to get involved, saying he hasn't seen the game since 2019 and so can't judge what sort of state it's currently in, or what kind of team would be required to finish it.

As the pressure continued, though, his mind slowly begin to change. On June 26, Collins-Laflamme said he was thinking about it, and was "even down to put $25 million by myself to finish Hytale," although he clarified that he hadn't made any formal moves in that direction.

Two days later, he committed to reaching out, although he told followers to keep their expectations "extremely low," because it's "next to impossible" to bring back projects like this once they've been shut down. Even after he reaches out to Riot, he warned, "it will take months to get answers and months to get done."

Since then, though, Collins-Laflamme seems to have settled into the commitment. On June 29 he posted "No risk, no story," and shared a video posted by KweebecCorner of a messianic figure essentially heralding his return.

Earlier today, he posted this.

Enthusiasm notwithstanding, Collins-Laflamme's caution from a few days ago is well placed. Riot might make Hytale available for acquisition and continuation, but it might not, too—there may be a feeling that its potential future value is worth more than what Collins-Laflamme is willing to sink into it. And even if Riot does surrender control, there's no guarantee that anything will come of it, much less a game as hyped as Hytale has become.

Still, the fact that the effort is being made at all has fans excited: A long shot is better than no shot at all. We'll see where it goes from here.

Riot Games believes that "building the future of esports means investing in a sustainable ecosystem, not just for today, but for the long run," Riot's president of publishing and esports John Needham said today, and that's why the studio has decided to open the door to "betting sponsorship opportunities" for Tier 1 League of Legends and Valorant teams in the US and EMEA.

"We know sports betting isn’t for everyone, and that some fans have strong feelings about it, and we respect that," Needham wrote in today's announcement. "However, the reality is that betting activity already exists around our sports and will continue whether we engage with it or not.

"Historically, this has been a restricted sponsorship category, and Riot has not engaged with betting companies. Teams have asked us to reconsider our stance, and after years of analysis to ensure we got it right, we agreed it was time to open up this category to create more revenue opportunities for teams."

There sure does seem to be a lot of money on the table. Needham cited figures provided by "sports technology company" Sportradar saying the "total betting turnover" on League of Legends and Valorant esports hit $10.7 billion worldwide in 2024. But 70% of betting across all sports—not just esports—is made in unregulated markets with unlicensed bookies, and Riot figures it's better for all involved if it moves to allow betting sponsorships "thoughtfully, carefully, and with the right protections."

That means Riot must vet and approve all potential betting partners before they're allowed to form a relationship with a team; potential betting partners must use official data provided by the GRID platform in their offerings; and all teams must establish an "Internal Integrity Program" that will "ensure competitive integrity, safeguard players and young audiences, [and] update responsible betting practices."

While Riot is embracing sports betting, it also seems to be taking steps to ensure it's not really seen to be embracing sports betting.

"Riot-owned broadcast and social channels will stay betting-free, which means no ads, no sponsored segments from betting partners, and no betting partner logos on team jerseys," ostensibly to avoid disrupting broadcasts with a flood of sports betting ads, Needham wrote. Individual teams will be left to determine how betting-related content appears within their channels, subject to all applicable guidelines and local laws.

To put it mildly, I have concerns. The ol' 'it's going to happen anyway so we should ensure it's done right' justification is almost never as high-minded as it's presented, and the real problem with sports gambling isn't that it's unregulated or sketchy, but that it's a scourge.

The World Health Organization says that "around 5.5% of women and 11.9% of men globally experience some level of harm from gambling," and cites a Swedish study indicating that people with gambling problems were 15 times more likely to die of suicide than the general population. Despite that, gambling "has been normalized through new commercial associations with sport and cultural activities that are now heavily promoted." Now Riot is going to contribute to that normalization for an audience that skews younger than those of conventional sports, a demographic the WHO says is especially susceptible to "heavy promotion of gambling online."

I take some small comfort in seeing that reactions to the announcement on the League of Legends and Valorant Competitive subreddits are not entirely positive. There's a lot of resigned acceptance and some cautious (maybe a little forced) optimism about better revenue shares for Tier 2 teams, but also plenty of concern about the long-term societal impact of endemic sports gambling.

The possibility of heightened toxicity or even violence against esports pros at the hands of angry gamblers was also brought up: "It's going to be especially bad for League/Val players since they are way more online than normal sport athletes," redditor CosmicMiru wrote.

So it seems like a terrible idea all around, at least for anyone who doesn't stand to make money on it, but Needham concluded by saying Riot believes "showing up in this space—responsibly—is better than letting others define it for us."

"We’ve said before that Riot is all in for the long term on our esports, and that means stepping into arenas like sports betting with an objective to both guide and protect our brands from bad actors by establishing what good looks like, while also providing an avenue for teams to benefit financially," he wrote.

"With any new endeavor, there will be challenges, and if we need to make adjustments, we will. Please know our overall commitment is to do right by our players, teams, and fans as well as the world-class esports experience that we’ve built together and want to see thrive for years to come."

After more than seven years of work, development of the sandbox RPG Hytale is being cancelled, and developer Hypixel Studios is being closed by parent company Riot Games.

"Today, I shared some incredibly tough news with the Hypixel Studios team: we’re ending development on Hytale and beginning the process of winding down Hypixel Studios over the next few months," Hypixel co-founder Noxy wrote in the cancellation announcement. "This is not the outcome any of us—at Hypixel or at Riot—wanted. But after years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise."

Hytale was first revealed in 2018, at which point it had already been in development "for several years." In 2020, the studio was acquired by League of Legends developer Riot Games, but a hoped-for release in 2021 was eventually pushed into 2023 "at the earliest," and a year later it was pushed again.

It sounds like mission creep may have been at the root of Hypixel's problems. "Over time, as our vision evolved and the genre matured around us, the bar kept rising," Noxy wrote. "Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found that Hytale still wasn’t as far along as it needed to be. It became clear we’d need a lot more time to get it to a place where it could support the ambitious vision for the game.

"We looked at reducing scope, adjusting timelines, and finding new angles to keep moving forward. But each of those options would have meant compromising on what made Hytale special in the first place. It wouldn’t have been the game we set out to make. And it wouldn’t have been the game you deserve."

Noxy said the Hytale team still believes in the game, but acknowledged that Riot was unable to find "investors or acquirers who could continue to help carry Hytale forward." He also expressed gratitude to Riot for "the years of support and opportunities," and the "generous severance and resources" being provided to laid-off employees.

The number of people being put out of work by the closure of Hypixel was not disclosed, but the studio's LinkedIn page describes it as "a team of more than 70 globally."

Optimists might hope that Hytale could somehow endure: You would think that after so many years sunk into the project, there'd be some kind of foundation on which to continue building, after all. But there are a lot of variables at play in that assumption too, including ownership of Hytale: Riot may not be willing to sink more money into it, but it may also be reluctant to have someone come along and pick up where it left off, taking advantage of the years of work that's already been done.

The game industry itself, meanwhile, continues to be bizarrely hostile to game developers. We had hoped that 2025 might herald a change after the brutal layoffs of 2023 and '24, but the cuts have continued more or less unabated: June alone has already seen layoffs at People Can Fly, Jagex, and Mighty Yell.

"Even though we’re closing this chapter, the spirit of Hytale and everything we hoped it could be will stay with us," he wrote. "We’re proud of what we built, and we’ll carry those lessons forward into whatever comes next."

Noxy also noted that the Hypixel Minecraft server, which is operated independently of Hypixel Studios, will continue to operate as usual.

League of Legends World Champion Maciej 'Shushei' Ratuszniak has died at the age of 36. The Polish national had been suffering from cancer for several years.

Shushei was best known as a member of the Fnatic team that won the first-ever League of Legends World Championship, and was also the first player to win the MVP award following the victory in 2011 (thanks, Esports Insider).

In celebration of the victory and award, Riot asked Shushei to choose a champion that would receive a tribute skin. He chose Gragas and the Fnatic Gragas skin is still available in-game.

Shushei was also a winner in Season 6 of the Intel Extreme Masters with Fnatic, and won at IEM Hannover with the team myRevenge in 2011. He retired from the competitive LoL scene in 2013. As well as his considerable skills, Shushei was also a much-beloved figure in the LoL scene, and responsible for this legendary chest bump.

"Yesterday, we lost a legend in Shushei," reads a post from the official Fnatic account. "Shushei was a part of the incredible Fnatic team that won the first-ever League of Legends World Championships back in 2011 that began the Fnatic LoL fandom for so many of our fans. Our thoughts are with his friends and family."

"Very sad to hear about the passing of Maciej 'Shushei' Ratuszniak," wrote esports journalist and former caster Richard Lewis. "He was instrumental in the rise of early League of Legends, bringing personality and likeability to an esport that needed those characters to propel it forward.

"I had the pleasure to meet him on a few occasions back when I did event coverage and even though he was funny he was deeply thoughtful and understood what professionalising an esport meant. May he rest in peace."

Lewis also posted this interview with Shushei from 2012:

"Rest in peace, Shushei, one of the first greats of our game," said LoL host Eefje Depoortere. "Way too young to go."

"Tough to hear the news about Shushei," wrote Zygomedia's Stephen Ellis. "I hadn’t spoke to him in over a decade but many fond memories of the stupid shit we got up to as kids traveling the world. 36… damn. Tomorrow isn’t promised."

As of this week, the official trading card game for League of Legends has a real name (it was formerly "Project K") and a release date: It'll be out in October as Riftbound: League of Legends Trading Card Game.

The first set, called Riftbound: Origins, will have 300 cards when it releases this summer in China and in "many English-speaking countries" countries in October.

Riftbound will be designed for both traditional 1v1 trading card game matches and popular modern multiplayer formats like 2v2 and free-for-all. The debut Origins set will include champions like Jinx, Garen, Lux, Yasuo, Lee Sin, Annie, Viktor, Volibear, and Master Yi, among others. It'll feature original art for the cards.

At launch, Origins will have a variety of products out: Preconstructed, ready-to-play Champion Decks for characters like Jinx; 14-card booster packs for those who want to beef up their collection; and a Proving Grounds starter set to start off a collection and help 2-4 people learn the game in a controlled way. Proving Grounds will include Lux, Annie, Master Yi, and Garen.

Riot's TCG developers say that Riftbound is intended to be a good starting point for people who have never played a TCG before, making it easy to teach your friends and easy for your friends to learn.

Those interested in the game will be able to find demo game events during upcoming Riot events and tabletop gaming conventions—because, as Riot emphasizes, not everything is final yet.

"We've been incredibly humbled by the excitement and interest from players around the world who can't wait to play Riftbound," said Chengran Chai, executive producer at Riot Games.

"We're grateful to the growing Riftbound community and the TCG players who've jumped in early to share their feedback including the call for more original art and refined UI. That feedback encouraged us to level up the game experience by revisiting some of our design decisions and conducting more playtests to ensure that we’re delivering a game that players will love."

The curious can learn and look out for more at riftbound.leagueoflegends.com.

Riot Games says recent changes to League of Legends' reward system "didn't hit the mark for everyone," and so it's bringing Hextech Chests back and reducing the Blue Essence cost for new champions by half.

Riot said in a January update that League's reward systems had "become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types," and other issues. To rectify that, the studio moved most of the game's rewards onto the battle pass, a move meant to streamline the process. But doing so left level-up rewards almost non-existent, making it more difficult for new players to unlock champions and skins.

The studio quickly acknowledged a problem with the underlying numbers and promised to "significantly increase" Blue Essence rewards, but some players continued to call for a return to the old system, or at the very least for the return of Hextech Chests, and now Riot has relented.

"It’s clear that for many of you, Hextech Chests weren’t just a way to get stuff, they were an important part of making your time in League feel rewarding," Riot wrote in a new developer update. "We didn’t fully grasp how much this mattered to you, and that led us to make changes that missed the mark."

So, with the release of the 25.05 patch next week, Hextech Chests are back: Players will be able to earn 10 chests and keys per act, eight on the free battle pass reward track and two more earnable through Honor. To make room for the addition of Hextech Chests, some battle pass rewards will be "consolidated," although Riot says it "won’t be changing the total amount of Blue Essence you earn per Pass, just moving it around a little." Riot also said the chests earned through the battle pass and Honor "will be the exact same Chests as the ones you got through Champ Mastery."

As for new champions, Riot said building out a roster is "a clear problem for new players," and in order to help ensure League remains "accessible," the 25.05 will also see the Blue Essence cost of all champions reduced by 50%. Changes are also coming to skins: The Exalted Mordekaiser skin is being delayed "to make sure it better delivers on its core fantasy," and more time will be dedicated to future Exalted skins, "so you likely won’t see one in every Act this year as originally planned." The overall number of Season skins is also going to be cut, so developers can spend more time on getting them right.

"Going forward, you can expect 3 thematic skins per pass, 2 normal skins and 1 Prestige," Riot wrote. "For Act 2, our plan is that the skins on the paid battle pass will be Prestige Darius, Sion, and Talon."

Some pretty big changes, then, and while not all players are entirely satisfied with the state of things, the general response to the re-addition of Hextech Chests and the reduced champion costs seems widely positive. And there's one more bit of good news: Head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon said on Reddit that players who bought a champion in the 25.4 patch can contact player support to get half the Blue Essence cost back.

The League of Legends dev team said on X that it's working on rolling out the 25.05 patch to the public beta environment today, but warned that some aspects of it "don't reflect the changes we've outlined in this morning's Dev Update. We're working on those currently and it may take a little time to reflect in that build."

We still haven't really had a proper look at 2XKO, Riot's League of Legends-based 2v2 fighting game, and it sounds like that's a state of affairs that's going to continue for a while yet. In a message posted on Reddit, 2XKO game director Shaun Rivera said plans for a global playtest in March have been pushed back, and instead it's going for something "much smaller" as developers continue to work on the game.

"We’ve seen and enjoyed the crazy memes and the hysteria of the subreddit while waiting for the Feb update, and wanna correct some of the misinformation going around," Rivera wrote. "We were planning on running a larger-scale global playtest next month, and the Feb update was going to cover what was in that playtest. Instead, we are going to focus on running a much smaller one than Alpha Lab 1 while we build out the infrastructure needed to make sure we can get the game in even more players hands later this year."

Alpha Lab 1 was 2XKO's first online playtest, based on a "super early build," that ran in August 2024. Riot said in November 2024 that it intended to hold another playtest in spring 2025, and that it would "be available in more regions than our first Alpha Lab."

Rivera also said that, following feedback from testers, Pulse Fuse has been "removed and replaced with an autocombo setting that each player can toggle on or off during champ select." Riot has also added a few Fuse called Sidekick, which keeps second fighters sidelined "to support your point champ, who gains additional health."

There's some excitement for those changes, but word of a smaller playtest has a lot of fans in the 2XKO subreddit convinced that the game, despite being in development since at least 2019 and having a hoped-for release in 2025, isn't going to be out anytime soon.

"Yeah the game isn't coming out till at least November/December if it is even coming out this year," redditor Sudden-Ad-307 wrote in response to Rivera's message.

"Pivoting to smaller Alpha Lab 2 means a global open beta won't happen until post-EVO," kiddavidacus added. "Even then, they seem to be making significant gameplay changes after the Alpha Labs. It'll be quite some time before we get close to a final build IMO. Also, I am sure there are major decisions on final roster size and monetization in-game."

Redditor HawksBurst wrote, "There's no way in hell this game's still coming in 2025 (which never was, let's be real) when we'd be getting an EVEN SMALLER alpha than the previous one, and the 'big reveal' was going to be a few chars at best." Gavor7 made an even more dire prediction in a very to-the-point comment: "Man this game is never coming out."

Some redditors expressed understanding of the lengthy development process, noting that Riot has made some big changes to 2XKO's design since it was first announced. But even much of that is tempered by disappointment: "What's annoying is they announced the game so many years early," sievold wrote. "It already feels like old news and the game hasn't even come out yet."

Unfortunately for 2XKO fans eager to know more, it sounds like details are going to have to wait. Rivera said Riot has "some other cool stuff that we are cooking, but we are not quite ready to talk about that just yet," and that developers "are excited to tell you more as soon as we can, ideally next month." So, maybe not next month, too.

League of Legends developer Riot Games recently announced that a hotly coveted character skin is coming to the MOBA. Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser will convert the game's necromantic top-laner from his default lich appearance back to his human form. It's a cosmetic with a lot of significance to League's canonical story, and Riot clearly knows it, putting together a dramatic trailer to accompany the announcement, viewable above.

In short, it's a big moment for the League of Legends community. But any player wanting to play as human Mordekaiser will likely have to pay through the nose to do so. That's because Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser will be added to League's recently created 'Exalted' tier of skins, and these can only be acquired by engaging with League's gacha-style Sanctum. Nabbing an Exalted skin from the Sanctum can be eye-wateringly costly, with League fans recently calculating that two-thirds of players won't receive an exalted skin before spending 32000RP, which converts to $246.15. Or as I like to think of it, four Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2s.

Naturally, the community feels pretty sour about the whole thing. " One of my all time most wanted skins ever was Sahn-Uzal/pre-resurrection Mordekaiser" wrote YouTuber NickyBoi on X, "but all that hype is obliterated knowing it's stuck in a $200 fomo gacha store". The responses to League's official reveal of the skin on X are similarly unimpressed, with many replies claiming that the skin looks cheap, as well as being expensive to acquire. Meanwhile, the r/MordekaiserMains channel is in complete meltdown, currently an endless scroll of posts with titles like "LMFAO @ Sahn Uzal 250$ skin" and "Can we all agree and come together to not spend a single cent on this scam skin?"

This isn't the first time Riot has landed in hot water with its community over perceived skin scalping since the launch of the Exalted tier. In June last year, fans pushed back against the introduction of a skin for vulpine mage Ahri that could cost up to $500. In response, game director Pu Liu said the pricing was "justified" because "the vast majority of players spend $0 on a free play game. As a consequence of that, the majority of our revenue comes from a small, single-digit percentage of players."

These players are commonly referred to in the industry as "Whales", and whale chasing is an established, if controversial, industry practice, especially when combined with the gambling element of gacha mechanics. The Sahn-Uzal skin is a good example of why. Whereas the Ahri skin was designed to celebrate renowned League player Faker, this one, as already mentioned, is quite closely tied to League lore, and therefore subtly pushes on a larger number of buttons that might tempt players into rolling the dice. On the face of it, everything here is optional and it's up to players whether they engage, but beneath this is a whole element of psychological manipulation, tempting players both to engage with the gacha mechanics in the first place, and then keep rolling until they get a reward in classic sunk-cost fallacy fashion.

The Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser skin arrives into League on March 5. Riot has made a run of questionable decisions lately, and not just regarding its business practices. In January, League received an update designed to get rid of "unnecessary complexity", which ended up making it next to impossible for new players to earn anything outside of the battle pass. After investigating, Riot admitted it had "screwed up" the calculations for the new reward system, stating that "the numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you."

Riot is making an MMO—that's not exactly news, given it's been technically making one since 2020. But its continued survival has been brought into question because, well, it's been making one since 2020. Plus, in March of last year, the company hit the reset button on it, which isn't typically a sign things are going well in an industry that's rather cutthroat.

There's still plenty of hope to go around, though—despite some layoffs early last year, Riot's mysterious MMO is still a bucket list item for its co-founder, Marc Merrill. That's as per a recent Game File interview with journalist Stephen Totilo. When asked by Totilo if they still thought an MMO was worth its weight in dev time, Merrill says: "Oh yeah. It's probably the project I personally spend the most time on as well."

Riot's got a bit of an uphill battle ahead by my estimation, though, since MMORPGs aren't really in vogue anymore. Their age has long since given way to live service games, with the 2010s-2015s golden age of new MMOs quite clearly seen in the rear-view. This nostalgia factor isn't a new element to Merrill. In fact, it seems to be part of why he's chasing it.

"I think many people who have historically loved MMOs sort of nostalgically look back and wish they could rediscover [them], I think that that is a very worthy experience to try to chase. And it's really hard to do … You need to have great [intellectual property], you need to have an incredible team, you need to be able to actually create a compelling world that people want to live in."

It's got that 'compelling world' down pat, at least. I joke with my friends, sometimes, that the best part about playing League of Legends is not playing it, but keeping tabs on its lore, animated shorts, and secondary games. That's proved triply true with the rip-roaring success of Arcane—my days of MOBA-induced raised blood pressure are mostly over, but boy would I love to go side-questing in Zaun.

"We've been investing so much for so long, over time," Merrill adds. "Sort of growing this world and adding dimensions. People want to run around the world of Runeterra. And so we want to help them do that, in ways that are worth it and meaningful to them." As for when? "Hopefully before we go to Mars." Ah.

Honestly, while I'm a little skeptical anyone can properly get an MMO off the ground in the year of our lord 2025, if anyone's gonna do it, it'll be Riot. Not because the studio's got some secret special sauce, but because it's probably big enough to successfully bankroll a LoL MMO, and the world is established enough to draw people in. If Riot can fund one of the most expensive animated series ever (still cheap by animation standards, though) it can probably endure the early-day wobbles of MMO development.

League of Legends players might spend countless hours brawling with each other, communicating through the ancient art of murder and mayhem, but what they can't do is have a simple chat. While a voice chat feature does exist, it's limited to party members, and because of that, it's gone underused.

That Riot Games has steered clear from adding fully fledged voice chat to League might not be too surprising when you consider the reputation its community has earned. In 2023, Riot developer Joe White noted that its introduction could create new problems, "especially for women and POC who get unfairly targeted by simply participating in voice comms".

However, voice chat has actually never been properly tested in League—at least not outside of esports and parties. On top of that, all the other major competitive online games, like Valorant, Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, and Call of Duty have voice chat. Although the League community is notoriously toxic, it's hard to find reasons why Riot hasn't even trialled the feature, giving the players at least the benefit of the doubt.

While not all players agree voice chat would be a great addition to the game, the League community has been asking for it for years now. Not only would it help players communicate vital pieces of information and reduce the number of unnecessary throws, but it would also help to bring League up to the modern gaming standards of highly competitive games.

Play to win

No matter if you're a regular ARAM enjoyer or a hardcore Solo Queue grinder, we all want to win in League. To do this, you need to keep track of your enemies on the minimap, along with their cooldowns and items; the spawn times of objectives; your positioning, tempo, and farming; and whatever potential crises your teammates might be dealing with. But it's considerably easier to play the game when that burden is shared among all five players and you can always ask in voice chat, "Where's the enemy jungler?"

Having all players in voice chat also adds an additional level of competition—with both teams on an even playing field, at least in terms of communication. This can best be felt during Clash tournaments, as most teams use Discord to increase their odds of winning and coordinate at a higher level. A lot of Clash matches are filled with nailbiting and adrenaline-fueled moments which likely never would have happened without voice chat.

The alternative, namely using pings, just doesn't cut it. We've all been there—spamming pings to our teammates so they don't go into the jungle, and they do it anyway, giving away a huge bounty and an objective. This might happen because they have pings turned off, you're on mute, or they are tunnel-visioning on the amazing play they have in mind. This entire situation, however, could be easily avoided with voice comms.

In some instances, you might not understand what the player is trying to tell you with their pings, especially when you're in the middle of a teamfight or skirmish. For example, a player might use the "On my way" ping during a skirmish, but you might not know if they are about to join the fight or if they plan on jumping at a nearby enemy. Pings would remain quite useful even with voice comms for fast communication without players trying to speak over one another, but they aren't as effective as the primary method.

War council

Two of the main concepts in League are micro and macro. While micro refers to your mechanical skills such as positioning and using cooldowns timely, macro involves aspects of the game such as objective control, roaming, rotations, and overall strategization. Although League is packed with action and many players rely on their micro to climb, macro is equally important, if not more so, mainly because no amount of mechanical prowess can help you if you don't know how to get the most out of a Baron buff.

But the macro side of things suffers without clear communication. Absent voice comms, you don't really have much time to plan out a strategy that would work for your team composition. Of course, you can use text chat, but realistically speaking, you don't have enough time to type out a full-blown strategy, let alone discuss it with teammates. Voice chat would allow you to DPS Baron Nashor and devise your next steps while you're doing that.

And when you're strategizing like this, or saving a teammate's bacon by warning them of trouble ahead, or coming to their aid when called, you're being humanized and generating camaraderie. League's reputation for toxic players is a bit of a generalization, but restrictions like this arguably make that rep harder to shake by not allowing players to show that they won't sink into the worst kinds of behaviors the moment their voice can be heard.

I am by no means saying everyone would suddenly become model players, transforming League into a utopia, but players would be incentivized to collaborate even more. If the situation gets out of control, there are options to mute the toxic individuals and report them through in-game tools. Riot has been stricter and stricter over the past couple of years with troublemakers, and has developed more systems to handle toxicity.

The most common way of monitoring voice chat is usually by recording and then reviewing it. Activision uses AI to review recordings in Call of Duty, for instance, and in Valorant Riot started rolling out the beta of its AI voice evaluation system all the way back in 2022. As per its audio file and transcript retention policies, it generates audio files and transcripts when a report is made or a violation is detected, and if there's a breach of the community code this can result in a comms restriction, a teamplay restriction, or an outright ban, from one day to permanent.

While AI allows support teams to quickly review a number of recordings, you can argue that it's missing that human touch and the ability to properly determine whether the behavior in question is worthy of a restriction or a ban. The best approach to punishing toxic players would be by combining both the support team and AI, but there's no perfect approach to creating a toxicity-free environment in competitive gaming. Riot clearly sees the value in trying to foster a less abusive community in Valorant, though, going so far as to invest in new tech, and it seems wasteful to not apply this to League as well.

The season of chat

Adding voice chat wouldn't miraculously solve League's toxicity problem, and there would still be players who would avoid it. However, that could put them at a heavy disadvantage and they'd have to work with the information forwarded to them via pings and text chat. However, adding the option to simply listen in on comms would easily solve that. Unfortunately, the sentiment of not being able to join due to the risk of abuse would remain. But issues like this won't be resolved if a full voice chat feature isn't at least tested—it simply hides the problems rather than confronting them.

It's time to at least try it and give players an opportunity to prove to Riot they can work together. An interesting, yet safe way to do that would be to implement a seasonal voice chat that would work only in Solo Queue. That way, Riot could test out the impact of voice chat on the quality of games and the levels of toxicity. On top of this, Riot could use the gathered data as a foundation to further reduce toxicity and improve the future iterations of voice chat.

It's hard to say if Riot will ever be able to spruce up the community to such an extent that voice chat would be added, but given that League is a highly competitive game where you depend on team communication, there are so many reasons why it should exist. League is an entirely different game when players collaborate towards the same goal—destroying the enemy Nexus.

The headquarters of League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games is a large office complex in Santa Monica, not far from the Palisades neighborhood that has been flattened by one of the deadly Los Angeles wildfires that started last week. Those offices have been closed since the start of the fires—which still haven't been fully contained—but Riot has found ways to make its campus useful with the help of employee volunteers.

"Early in the crisis, we provided a backup generator to a local fire station that had lost power, enabling them to continue fighting fires and protecting homes," Riot said in a blog post on Thursday. The developer also donated 400 meals from its employee cafeteria to nearby emergency responders, and says that it will "explore different ways to use our physical space to help the community in the weeks and months to come."

Last week, Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja said that the game developer intends to "stand up for Los Angeles" and give back however it can.

To that end, Riot has also made donations to the California Fire Foundation and International Medical Corps, offered to triple employee donations to firefighting and relief efforts, and says it has provided "temporary housing, emergency stipends, and access to advisory services" for Riot employees who evacuated or lost homes—thousands of structures have been destroyed by the fires.

Next week, Riot will launch fundraisers in League of Legends and Valorant:

• Valorant: From January 22 until it leaves the Featured Store on January 30, the EX.O Collection will become a Give Back Bundle. Similar to other VALORANT fundraisers, proceeds from weapon skins and accessories in the bundle during this time will go to the Riot Games Social Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund account sponsored by ImpactAssets.
• League of Legends: From January 23, 12:00 pm PT to February 5 11:59 am PT, proceeds from Firefighter Tristana (unvaulted for this fundraiser) will go to the Riot Games Social Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund account sponsored by ImpactAssets.

"Recovery doesn't end when the fires are extinguished," Riot's blog post concludes. "Rebuilding communities takes time, and this crisis—so close to home for our headquarters—has inspired us to strengthen our commitment to natural disaster relief and prevention on a global scale. Whether it's supporting frontline responders, helping displaced families, or contributing to long-term recovery efforts, we remain dedicated to standing with communities in need, here in Southern California and across the world."

Game developer Necrosoft has also been organizing a California Fire Relief Bundle on itch.io, which should be available soon.

Cal Fire currently reports that the Palisades Fire, the largest of them by area, is 31% contained, while the Eaton Fire is 65% contained. According to the LA Times, those fires have so far resulted in 27 confirmed deaths and over 10,000 structures destroyed.

Riot Games says it "screwed up" recent changes to League of Legends that were intended to simplify the game's overly complex reward systems, but instead dramatically slowed level advancement and new hero unlocks. Head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon said in an update posted today that "the numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you," and promised that fixes are incoming.

The changes, announced in November 2024, were intended to reduce the "unnecessary complexity" of League's reward system by moving most of it to the free track of the game's battle passes. "Most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass," van Roon explained in a dev update. "For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

But the elimination of the previously-existing level-up rewards had the knock-on effect of making it much harder to unlock new champions and skins, particularly for new players: One redditor estimated it would likely take more than a year for a new League of Legends player to be able to play ranked matches, because players need to be level 30 and own at least 20 champions to be eligible, and it would take that long to achieve those requirements. "This really feels like a bug to me [rather] than being intentional," they wrote.

As it turns out, they were correct. Van Roon said in today's update that Riot intended to ensure the earn rates for Blue Essence—an in-game currency used to unlock new content—were the same or slightly better for all players under the new system. It also didn't mean to slow the speed of leveling or increase the number of games required to access ranked play.

But an analysis of player behaviour reveals that this is exactly what happened for the majority of the League of Legends player base. The changes worked out as intended for "low engaging players," but the higher up you go in terms of hours played, the worse it gets: "Super high" engagement players have seen their Blue Essence earn rate cut by more than 71% under the new system.

All of this happened, van Roon explained, because Riot biffed the numbers. "We realized that we didn't factor in the First Win of the Day experience into our calculations for BE income—both directly from that XP boost and the indirect faster access to Champion Capsules from account leveling," he wrote. "As for account XP, the problem is very similar—we hadn't accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked."

To address the issue, Riot says it will "significantly increase" the Blue Essence earn rates on the free battle pass track in changes expected to go live in patch 25.S1.2, as seen in the chart below:

Because the Act 1 season pass is live and some players have already passed the Blue Essence milestones, Riot will also roll out a "one-time easily completable mission" that will grant players 4,250 Blue Essence, to make up for what should have been granted through the battle pass. Account XP earn rates will also be increased by 40% to ensure the number of games required to reach level 30, and thus ranked access, will be roughly where it was before the changes were made.

The reaction to the admission and incoming fixes seems generally positive, although quite a few players on X and the League of Legends subreddit are calling for a reversion to the old rewards system, or at the very least the return of Hextech Chests. But there's still pretty widespread discontent to be seen, and that likely won't change until the fixes are fully rolled out and Riot demonstrates that player rewards are effectively the same as they were under the previous system.

Beyond the fixes, van Roon said Riot will "be digging more into exactly why this slipped through to begin with, and how we can prevent similar issues from arising in the future. We'll keep you updated as we continue to look into these systems on any potential adjustments, and we apologize for our misses here on both the numbers tuning and comms around what was/wasn't changing."

League of Legends season 1 saw a bunch of new features and changes made, including a new thematic that revolves around Noxus, a change to ranked resets, and a more streamlined reward system. While the last change may seem like a smart idea, it's wound up causing more harm than good for some players.

"Over the years these systems have become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types, we could go on," developer Andrei Van Roon says in a dev update. "You've been given some key fragments that you then have to craft into a key that you pair with a chest, that you open up to get another key and a chest and some essence that you open up to get a skin shard then you pay for some orange essence or reroll to eventually get a random skin. That's sort of a level of unnecessary complexity going on."

Another problem with rewards in League of Legends was that everything was scattered throughout the client. It was needlessly hard to keep track of how to get rewards and where they ended up. So, to solve the issue of unorganised rewards, the developers decided to just put it all in one place: the battle pass.

"We're moving most of our scattered reward systems to the free track of those battle passes," Roon says. "So most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass. For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free。 from r/leagueoflegends

Unfortunately, streamlining rewards isn't the only consequence of these changes. Some players realised that this reliance on the battle pass now means level-up rewards are non-existent, making it harder for new players to unlock champions and skins.

"It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free," cpztpkqc says. "Right now, you can only get Blue Essence from the Battle Pass. After you grind through the first 50 levels, you need to play for 882 hours to unlock a single extra champion! Is League of Legends deliberately trying to shut out all newcomers?"

It used to be that players could get champion capsules after reaching a new level. Those provide champion shards and/or Blue Essence, which you could then use to unlock new champions. But you now have to get these entirely from the battle pass.

However, the battle pass will still provide some good incentives via free rewards for players to earn. "You can earn 12 skins per year with the free pass. Half of these skins will be themed to the season you unlock them in," Roon says. "We'll also be simplifying the loot and crafting system... Overall, we want the pass to be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards. If you choose to buy the paid version, we also want it to be very clear what you're getting and how to make the most of it."

For the most part, players are angry on behalf of newcomers who won't have access to the 169 champions, and will now have to work even harder to unlock the roster. Or for casual players who don't want to invest a ton of time and money into League of Legends but still want to be rewarded for the effort they do put in.

"So, they have not only removed the weekly chests that kept the casual players that play very seldom in the game, [but also got] rid of the champion capsules once you level up, nerfing the pass and releasing deteriorated [skins] in terms of quality," one player says. "They really want to kill their own game by being anti-f2p."

League of Legends is 16 years old now, and has had a famously hard time when it comes to fostering new players. Last year, a senior Riot developer reported that the League of Legends playerbase is getting older: "Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago."

Even after the success of Arcane, a report from Bloomberg suggested that Riot still couldn't retain the new players that it caught through the animated series. So making progression less rewarding may not be a step in the right direction for League of Legends, not if they want to encourage new players to withstand the onslaught of flaming from their angry teammates who, in my experience, zero in on newbs from miles away.

League of Legends is getting its first in-game season of 2025 soon and, as is Riot's tradition, there's a big and flashy new trailer with some gorgeous animation to accompany it. Namely, it has collaborated once again with Fortiche, the studio Riot threw $250 million at to make Arcane, a bet which I'm pretty happy to say has paid off.

The venture's been so successful, in fact, that Riot's promised new shows featuring Demacia, Noxus, and Ionia. We know that Fortiche is involved, making this season's Noxus-themed trailer very interesting because, well, just look at the thing.

It's all looking too fleshed out to be a throwaway. New designs take a while to formulate—meaning smaller-scale animation projects like trailers and the like will try to keep the scope of what they actually show relatively limited. Unless Fortiche is incapable of keeping its cool (which is very possible) the sheer budget poured into this trailer's multiple locations has me suspicious we basically just got a trailer for a new show disguised as a game advertisement.

There's also the fact that there are several new redesigns for League of Legends champions, here. The two most obvious are Darius and Trundle, who we can see duking it out to a captive audience in the Freljord, but I'm pretty much certain that the woman we see fighting with twin blades is Katarina, a Noxian assassin, pitched against creepy spider-woman Elise. The golden-collared mage at the end is likely LeBlanc, too, accompanied by Vladimir. All of this to say, you don't just redesign six iconic champions if you aren't planning on doing anything with 'em.

The timeline makes sense, too. Arcane showrunner Christian Linke also stated back in November 2024 that the next show's been in development for about a year, which is ample time to have a set of character designs and sets finalised for a trailer. I'd be shocked if the designs we're seeing here are going to change much, going forward.

Besides, not only is Mel just there, showing us her character's trajectory after the events of Arcane Season 2, LeBlanc outright states that "Piltover was a lesson" before hinting at some Black Rose cabal mischief. Folks, if I'm not looking at a teaser for Fortiche's next League spinoff, then I'm not sure what I'm looking at, at all.

Update: Riot has clarified that the new looks for Elise and Katarina in this cinematic are the Masque of the Black Rose Elise and Prestige Masque of the Black Rose Katarina skins. Riot also announced in today's dev update that LeBlanc is getting a visual update, which would explain the new look. So, impressive trailer, absolutely, but a preview of the upcoming Noxus show? It looks like it might be hat-eatin' time.

This is the fallout of the SAG-AFTRA strike for ol' Riot: As announced on the studio's X account earlier this week, the Riot Games will "be temporarily using existing (base) VO for some English-language skins in League of Legends & Wild Rift. Other languages will still have custom VO. Once the strike ends, we’ll record new VO with the original actors."

For context, the actors union has been taking action over a lack of AI protections for voice actors since July. In September, this strike extended to League of Legends, though Riot maintained its (relative) innocence.

See, Riot Games uses Formosa Interactive for its US voiceover work. Formosa is the named company that SAG-AFTRA was targeting by selecting League of Legends for strike action, rather than any named transgressions from Riot itself. That's not to sanitise Riot, mind—it has still chosen to continue its working relationship with Formosa, despite claims it "asked Formosa to engage with Union performers in the US". Still, Formosa seems primarily at fault for dragging its feet regarding AI protections.

An announcement on Riot's website goes into further detail: "During the strike, we’ll have to adjust how we handle English-language VO for certain skins to ensure we can still deliver new content. For League PC skins for champions with U.S.-based voice actors, we’ll temporarily use existing voiceovers (base VO) instead of recording new lines with different actors. While Wild Rift is not a struck video game, if actors decline projects with us because they are standing in solidarity during the labor strike, we will ship with base VO.

"Once the strike ends, we’ll update skins released with English base VO to include new lines recorded by the original actors, as soon as scheduling and studio availability allow. We know this isn’t ideal, and we understand it’s frustrating to have to wait for custom VO, but this approach lets us respect the ongoing strike while continuing to deliver new content. We’re committed to bringing you updated VO with the quality you expect as soon as we can."

This tactic has drawn ire from some voice actors already—see, SAG-AFTRA has interim agreements that companies can sign, allowing performers to "render services on that specific production without being in violation of the strike order." Some believe the move as Riot weaseling its way out of that potential solution.

Anairis Quinones, who voices characters in Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, as well as Kimberly in Street Fighter 6, writes: "Let’s translate the marketing shall we? They don’t want to sign the contract that would protect and promise their VAs won’t be used for AI, and would rather starve them thru the holidays and wait for them to stop striking." She's certainly not alone, and the quote posts are a minefield of voice actors and their supporters calling for Riot to sign on the dotted line.

Now, you could make the argument that Formosa Interactive is once more at fault, here, and that Riot is simply doing the best it can—but while I've reached out to Riot Games to hear its exact reasoning from the tap, Quinones also answers this directly in a separate thread:

"The recording studios they work with are at the behest of their client; if Riot wants to sign the interim contract that protects VAs, the studio will make it happen. If they don’t, the studios won’t. And if it’s the studio that’s going against the company’s wishes, then they would just go to another studio—and no studio wants to lose a major client like Riot."

Essentially, the counter-argument—not unfairly so—states that Riot does have a heck of a lot of pull here, and it's strange it's not leveraging it on behalf of its voice talent. Even in a best-case scenario, this is a half-measure. It's a little better than Call of Duty just quietly recasting actors (and potentially using AI), but still, nobody gives out 'not as much of an asshole as you could have been' awards. I'll update this article if I get a response from the studio itself—until then, the original voice work shall persist until the skins improve.

Final Fantasy 14 is no stranger to crossovers. It's gone all multiverse with Dragon Quest, Yo-kai Watch, GARO, Monster Hunter, Fall Guys, and (naturally) other Final Fantasy games. I think my favourite of the lot are the Nier: Automata raids from Shadowbringers, if only because there's a scene where a swarm of androids dive-bomb some dwarves, and it gave me harsh enough mental whiplash to be enjoyable, like a spicy hot wing with some kick.

Well, it turns out there's more crossovers on the wishlist once Dawntrail's done with, according to an interview with lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa. Speaking to our friends over at GamesRadar, Nakagawa confessed his enduring love for League of Legends, which he's played a whole bunch:

"I personally love League of Legends and have been playing the game for a long time, so a crossover with them would be a dream come true." Now, you might be asking whether or not such a storyline would capitalise on the runaway popularity of Arcane, perhaps having you go toe-to-toe with Jinx or exchange fisticuffs with Vi. Wrong.

"It would be great fun if Aatrox and Aurelion Sol were featured as raid bosses in FF14," Nakagawa says. For context, Aatrox is a giant behorned fallen celestial avatar that body-hops via the blade he's imprisoned inside, whereas Aurelion Sol is an ancient star dragon. Honestly? While I'd love to see Zaun and Piltover in FF14 (for the glamour, if anything), those two concepts do sound like perfect fodder for the games' raids: "If a Riot Games representative is reading this, it would be an honor if I could speak with you!"

As for crossovers on Square Enix's home turf, Nakagawa's got his eyes on the FF7 remake, just like Yoshi-P. But, like, only if they want to hang out, or something: "I imagine it would have to be after the FF7 Remake trilogy is complete, but it is very exciting to think about designing crossover content with various FF7 characters and bosses. That being said, I absolutely do not want to interfere with the FF7 team's development right now, so I’d like to perhaps bring it up with them when an appropriate opportunity arises."

Honestly, whether I'm doing battle with some big dragon I've never heard of (a thousand apologies, my misspent youth was in Dota 2 instead) or Cloud Strife, I'm all for more raids. Alas, given the pretty rigid structure of FF14, it's unlikely that this stuff would crop up for years: each expansion only gets one Alliance Raid per, and FF14 is currently embroiled in the very good Echoes of Vanadiel series.

Mind, smaller collaborations aren't out of the question. The Fall Guys event, aside from being hilariously at-odds with the game's ailing netcode, was a gold saucer romp. Meanwhile, the Monster Hunter fight with Rathalos was a one-and-done brawl. Just… don't let Arcane Singed into Etheiyrs. If his track record is any indication, he'll have us all weeping and trying to kill each other to sick musical montages in no time which, while stylish, are sure to kill my Dawntrail vacation vibes.

In a slickly produced four-minute video, Riot Games revealed that it's been working on a card game. This came as news to players of its existing card game, Legends of Runeterra, which had its team and scope reduced as part of broader cuts at Riot in January. But this isn't a digital card game. This is a physical TCG, codenamed Project K.

"Project K is not a physical version of the fantastic Legends of Runeterra," game director Dave Guskin said in the breathless trailer, "but it does inherit some of the rich champion design philosophies of LoR."

That didn't help to appease Legends of Runeterra's fans, who have interpreted this announcement as a betrayal. Comments on YouTube and Reddit are full of pained responses like "Imagine trusting a Riot card game after what they did to LoR" and "Legends of Runeterra died for this" and "Lowkey a slap in the face to LoR's existence lol." (There are also a few jokers gleefully pointing out that the art depicts "Old Viktor in the cards? LMAO" rather than the divisive new version in season two of Arcane.)

Guskin described Project K as a card game that can do it all, saying, "Whether your jam is team 2v2 battles or free-for-alls, a way to relax with friends or go all in on alliances, backstabbing, and betrayals, we think we've created the best social TCG out there and something you will really enjoy." Magic: The Gathering's popular Commander format would like a word, I suspect.

Project K will have a staggered release, beginning with a launch in China early next year. "We want to have competitive play that reaches from the store level all the way up to national-level tournaments and maybe even global events," executive producer Chengran Chai said.

Viktor is, uh, looking a little different, recently. As displayed in Riot Games' recent Season 1 update, the developer is keen to start working lore changes made in Arcane, a TV series that's been way better than it's had any right to be, into League of Legends itself. It's an understandable move in terms of marketing, but it's also been heavy handed enough to peeve the old guard something fierce.

Viktor (the champion) has existed in the game for 13 whole years. Fans have had time to grow attached to his presentation, his aesthetic, and his machine herald swag—which is why Riot coming out of nowhere and hitting him with the twink beam to have him closer match Viktor (the TV character) hasn't gone down smoothly. Gone is the relatively square, jaded idealist and genius philanthropist with an obsession for cybernetic replacement. Arcane Viktor is here, no negotiations.

The community subreddit for the character, r/viktormains, has been having an especially normal one, calling a campaign to see his slightly buffer, chonkier appearance the "revert-lution". "Why are his hips so GRABBABLE?" cries one player in a thread lamenting his slender, effeminate frame, as another chimes in: "I won't stand his top erasure!! Where is the bulge???" I'm a particular fan of this "in loving memory" card, which mourns his memory as a "scientist, innovator, divorced and communist". May he be remembered.

And, look. While I'll always have a sensible chuckle over people losing their gourd, I think I'm on the players' side, here. At least, to a certain extent. Riot has the right to do whatever it wants with its IP and game, but it does feel harsh to unilaterally redesign a swathe of skins that people paid money for years ago. A botched graphical update is one thing, body-swapping stuff that cost actual cash is another. Here's some direct comparisons, courtesy of Remus on YouTube.

Riot does, at least, seem to be taking the feedback into account. As shared by user VrrSolo on the same subreddit, both the Creator and the Death Sworn Viktor skins have received touch-ups on the Public Beta Environment, League of Legends' test server. Namely, Riot's added more details and restored some of the chonkiness that Viktor fans had lost.

It's only a small step towards glorious reconciliation, though, with said subreddit responding with a lukewarm appreciation at best. If anything, this whole rework does seem a little poorly-handled. League of Legends' skins aren't exactly unified in their aesthetic—and there are plenty of skins that present alternate-canon versions of its roster. So why go back and reinvent the wheel when players could have both? Still, it looks like Riot's all-in on weaving Arcane into the game's universe, so here's hoping for some smoother inclusions in the future.

Arcane's second season has hit some fans all weird—while I'm of the opinion that animation studio Fortiche did a pretty dang good job all things considered, cramming as much story as it possibly could into every frame, it's also an imperfect show in the sense that all shows are imperfect. Coulda, woulda, and even some scant shouldas abound.

Namely, some fans felt that the season's finale was a mite rushed, being a mostly standard-length episode where everything gets tied up in a bow faster than fabric in a bow-making factory. This particular rumour mill hasn't been helped by interview asides made by co-creator Christian Linke, who has said in interviews that he'd have liked a bit more time to wrap up certain arcs.

I've been a medium amount of skeptical that anything nefarious went on behind the scenes, especially given Arcane had a very high budget (although still not too far above most animated movies in terms of watch-hours) for production and marketing both. Now, Linke's taken to Reddit to set the record straight (thanks, Gamesradar):

"Some theories are a bit too far out there," writes Linke, before having to come out and state that one conspiracy—that the showrunners asked Foritche for a feature-length finale and got rejected, is right out: "It's quite the opposite, our scripts are always shorter than what Fortiche ends up proposing in the story board phase. We wanna let them get inspired and roam free, so we can then reel it in while also allowing for the magical moments to find themselves. It's a tight creative collaboration, not some sort of 'alright vendor company, do your work, achieve the impossible, but do it quickly!'"

The corporate greed angle, Linke says, is also a heap of nothing: "Yes, there are always constraints, both in budget and time. That's part of our job as creatives, to work within those constraints. Constraints are NORMAL, and they were always generous, and I always had final say on anything creative. But they do exist. They also existed during Season 1."

I think that's fair enough—while the show's first season saw praise along the lines of 'this is what happens when you give artists all the time and money they want', fact of the matter is, if you're making anything for cash, it's gonna have a deadline. Sometimes it'll have a deadline even if you aren't getting paid, just because you'd like to finish the thing someday. Riot was generous by comparison, but its patience and budget isn't infinite, and, more to the point, neither was the patience of the people animating the show.

"It would have been great to have more time to work on this second season, or extra time to add to the episodes, but we didn't have it. For a number of reasons. Budget being one. We have been EXTREMELY lucky … NOBODY ELSE gets these types of budgets. Please don't forget that.

"Time being the other constraint … There's a release window that a massive amount of people work towards, not just at Fortiche, but also at Riot on different games, at Netflix, brand partners. Even key talent that works on the show that, simply put, is getting tired cranking away at this incredibly long season and project over multiple years."

In other words—nothing lasts forever, and no creative endeavour comes out perfect. That might leave a bit of a sting to those expecting some kind of transcendental storytelling nirvana out of Arcane's second season, but for me, my rotten little heart loves imperfect and wonky stories. I'm also glad Fortiche, a studio I want to see make other stuff, hasn't burned itself out completely in the pursuit of passion.

"It's not perfect. You don't take these types of hefty swings and expect that everything wraps up perfectly with a neat bow tie. It grows and evolves in its own way, and it becomes what it becomes." While I do appreciate Linke's transparency here, I do think now that he's said his piece it's time to log off for a minute—you categorically can't please everyone. Besides, it ain't over until the fatcats stop funding a big animated League of Legends universe. I think that's how the saying goes, anyway.