{"id":148824,"date":"2021-12-13T14:00:47","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T20:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/?p=148824"},"modified":"2021-12-13T10:21:51","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T16:21:51","slug":"ruined-king-riot-blizzard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/2021\/12\/13\/ruined-king-riot-blizzard\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruined King demonstrates how Riot is looking forward and taking chances Blizzard should have years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>is a single-player, turn-based RPG, made by the folks at Airship Syndicate and published by Riot Forge. Remember Riot Forge<\/a>? It’s a publishing label within Riot, and it’s focused on publishing games developer by third-party (i.e., non-Riot) devs. In other words, it’s a way to help expand the League<\/em> universe by working with developers who are already familiar with a specific genre.<\/p>\n

Ruined King<\/em> is the first such title to be released under Riot Forge, and it’s also an easy game to onboard as a player — I know literally nothing<\/em> about\u00a0League of Legends<\/em>. I don’t know the characters, I don’t play the game at all, I’m not a huge MOBA fan. And yet, I came on to\u00a0Ruined King<\/em> and had no trouble following the context of the story and the characters, and I’ve been enjoying the game quite a bit.<\/p>\n

I mean, I was expecting to — I’ve enjoyed every previous Airship Syndicate game, and their\u00a0Battle Chasers: Nightwar<\/em> is one of my favorite modern JRPG-style games. But Ruined King<\/em> is better — it manages to weld ideas imported from the MOBA (like Lane abilities) in a wholly distinct way that again doesn’t require any League <\/i>experience to understand and utilize. It’s a solid, fun, single-player experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Riot is doing what Blizzard should have done already<\/h2>\n

It is, in short, everything we’ve been asking Blizzard to make for the past 20 years. It really shows that Riot is not afraid to take chances and departures with their IP in a (so far) markedly successful attempt to get their games in front of more people who might never play League <\/i>at all. Between taking the fight to\u00a0Overwatch<\/em> with their\u00a0Valorant<\/em><\/a> — although I’d argue that Apex Legends<\/em> actually won that battle — releasing Arcane<\/em><\/a> to rave reviews and a lot of fan interest, and also deviating even more wildly afield with\u00a0Hextech Mayhem,<\/em><\/a> Riot has done a lot to broaden their brand and make Runeterra into a setting bigger than their signature game. Heck, they even made a card game<\/a>! I haven’t even mentioned\u00a0Teamfight Tactics<\/em> or\u00a0Wild Rift<\/em> here.<\/p>\n

Blizzard has been rumored to be working on various projects like a\u00a0Diablo<\/em> Netflix series<\/a>, and even created an Activision Blizzard Studio<\/a> to make an Overwatch<\/em> animated series, but nothing has come of it.\u00a0Hearthstone<\/em> has been successful, but\u00a0Heroes of the Storm<\/em> hasn’t seen much development since they scaled back their team and the fact is, that constantly rumored single-player game never gets made — remember\u00a0Ghost,\u00a0<\/em>or maybe even\u00a0Ares<\/em><\/a>, two different attempts at a\u00a0StarCraft<\/em> single-player experience? Riot is unafraid to bring their IP into wholly new genres as well as create entirely new<\/em> settings for games with brand new characters. And they’re leveraging all of that success into cross-promotion with games like Fortnite<\/em> and\u00a0Among Us<\/em> to get focus on their animated\u00a0Arcane<\/em> series — and it’s all really telling.<\/p>\n

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Ruined King<\/em> proves that you can make games that stand on their own inside your established settings<\/h2>\n

I keep coming back to\u00a0Ruined King<\/em> as an example of how Riot has taken characters and story beats from League <\/i>and made them work in a completely different format — and frankly, all those years of people asking Blizzard to do this for their games has me wondering why it never happened. It should<\/em> have happened. Riot didn’t even\u00a0make<\/em> this game. They got people who really know the genre to do it. Similarly,\u00a0Hextech Mayhem<\/em> was published by Riot Forge, but is a creation of Choice Provisions, who made the rhythm platforming Runner<\/em><\/a> series. Frankly, this is an idea that Blizzard should embrace and take full advantage of — imagine a single-player RPG set in the Overwatch<\/em> setting made by CD Projekt Red or BioWare or Spiders.<\/p>\n

The fact is, although Riot certainly<\/a> has its own problems<\/a> as a company, it feels like they’ve managed to do moves that people have been saying Blizzard should have been doing for literally years and years, things they clearly have been\u00a0trying<\/em> to do. You don’t want to make a single-player RPG, Blizzard? Get someone who does<\/em> want to make one and let\u00a0them<\/em> do it! You’ve made some amazing cinematics over the years, but you haven’t really taken advantage of all that talent to make the jump to an actual animated series despite having started your own studio to do exactly that. This is stuff you could have been doing as far back as 2012 — with animated shorts like\u00a0Wrath<\/em> showing off your storytelling<\/a>\u00a0chops it was a move many fans were clamoring for.<\/p>\n

I guess it comes down to waiting to see how well\u00a0Diablo Immortal —<\/em> a game Blizzard is making via a partnership with NetEase — ends up being. It really feels like Blizzard has had a lot of missed opportunities here, ones Riot clearly took notice of and moved to capitalize on. Ruined King<\/em> is an example of how Riot found people and got games made that don’t even require you know the first thing about the source game to play and enjoy them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story\u00a0is a single-player, turn-based RPG, made by the folks at Airship Syndicate and published by Riot Forge. Remember Riot Forge? It’s a publishing label within Riot, and it’s focused on publishing games developer by third-party (i.e., non-Riot) devs. In other words, it’s a way to help expand the League…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":134544,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60356,43498,75236,66854],"tags":[75280,4456,75279,11249,75296,75277],"yst_prominent_words":[39131,8181,8585,8215,12667,8296,30415,11513,9009],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148824"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148957,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148824\/revisions\/148957"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148824"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=148824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}