For MOBAs like League of Legends, new playable characters are a crucial part of maintaining player interest in the game. Each champion that Riot Games creates offers fans a new playstyle to either master or learn to counteract, constantly putting player skills to the test. The next League of Legends champion is a electrifying Zaunite marksman called Zeri, and as Riot explained in a new dev video, her approach to dishing out physical damage is very skill reliant, thanks to her skillshot ability that fulfills the role of a basic attack. However, Zeri wasn't all that Riot teased in the video; it also touched on champions for later in 2022.
One champion that Riot addressed was the villainous new support coming to League of Legends, but additionally, it announced a menacing new jungler. While Riot didn't explicity confirm it, its performative, cryptic teaser for the champion strongly suggests that the jungler stems from the Void, the eldritch dimension known for spawning monstrous League of Legends champions like Cho'Gath and Kha'Zix. That's excellent news for League of Legends fans. The community has wanted a new monstrous champion from the Void for a long time, so 2022 delivering such a character is cause for optimism when looking toward the game's future.
The Void's Changing Luck
For a long time, the Void has been woefully underserved in League of Legends. The last Void-related character to join the game was 2018's Kai'Sa, the daughter of Kassadin who has finally escaped the Void after surviving inside it for years. Before that, the last true Void monster to release was 2014's Rek'Sai. League of Legends fans have been expressing their distress over this lack of Void representation for some time. It's an unfortunate truth that League of Legends tends to get more champions from its core in-lore regions while more peripheral areas of Runeterra tend to get left behind.
Thankfully, it looks like that long wait will be over in 2022. In the new dev video, Champion Team Lead Ryan "Reav3" Mirales says that the frightening upcoming champion, which appears to possess him momentarily, will "swarm" into the game sometime after the new support champion. From the sounds of things, League of Legends will get some sort of telepathic hivemind from the Void in 2022, which sounds like the kind of surprising, monstrous creature that players have wanted to see added for a long time. League of Legends has plenty of humanoids, so a potential swarm character would be a wonderful change of pace.
Using All of League of Legends' Regions
The introduction of a new Void champion would be wonderful for League of Legends' future for two reasons. The first reason is that the Void is one of several regions in the game that have gotten little recognition in recent years. For instance, although Qiyana's debut established the existence of Ixtal in 2018, there hasn't been a new representative of this secretive nation since then. Similarly, although the Freljord is one of LoL's oldest and most iconic regions, there hasn't been a new Freljordian character since Ornn in 2017. The Void's upcoming champion suggests that Riot is trying to give some love to these sidelined parts of Runeterra.
The second is that a Void swarm inspires hope that Riot will create more non-humanoid designs in the future. League of Legends' compelling creatures range from the catfish-like Tahm Kench to the tentacular Vel'Koz, but on the whole, the game has focused more on human or near-human characters. Many League of Legends fans want to see Riot Games break that formula more often, so if there's a character composed of a swarm on the way, then there's hope yet for those designs. The new representative of the Void may be several months away, but nevertheless, it's a good sign for the future of League of Legends. Variety is the spice of life, after all.
League of Legends is available now for PC.
