Valorant's League of Legends tie-in adds a mammoth spectral sword

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If you like vision-obscuring weapons, boy does Riot have the skin for you.

The next major League of Legends event, Sentinels of the Light, starts July 8th, and introduces the new champion Akshan alongside a bunch of skins themed around the larger Ruination of Runeterra storyline. And as part of this, Riot is for the first time 'collaborating' with itself, by having a bunch of crossover items in a new Valorant update.

Valorant's ‘Ruination’ skins are based on League of Legends and, as you can see in the above video from Youtuber Hitscan, have a lot of mystical jewels and fog going on. There's a Phantom, Guardian, Spectre, Ghost, and most interestingly a melee weapon that will be familiar to LoL-heads: the blade of the ruined king.

This is a broken sword at level 1, but at level 2 the broken blade is restored with crystalline light. It takes up a big chunk of the screen so not for me, but does look cool, and don't worry about the range: level 2 doesn't extend it, and only you see the 'ghost' blade part, so as not to confuse other players (if you want to see it in action, here's a timestamped video).

There's some patch notes along for the ride too. "Sage can no longer place Barrier Orb on some projectiles while they’re in the air", which I've never seen but sounds bonkers, "Fixed bug where Skye was able to activate the flash of Guiding Light while suppressed", "Fixed the ability to heal KAY/O while downed in NULL/CMD" and "Fixed Sova’s Recon Bolt projectile from looking deployed for enemies when flying through the air."

There are a bunch of minor changes too, including stopping players from changing text chat colours in order to impersonate system messages, the squishing of some UI bugs, and a fix for a problem that was stopping some players from progressing properly. The LoL-themed skins will arrive in Valorant tomorrow alongside the Sentinels of the Light event.

Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."