A major overhaul of League of Legends is reportedly coming in 2027: 'Once we're done, it should be the best time ever to get your friends into League'

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.

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