Wild Rift devs open to exclusive characters but not anytime soon

cover art for league of legends: wild rift.Riot Games

In a recent announcement from Riot’s new head of League Studio, it appears devs are planning on opening Wild Rift to exclusive champions, thereby only available on the mobile MOBA. But this won’t occur for a couple of years, they suggested.

Recently, Samira and Sion released on Wild Rift, with rumors of Yone and Gwen floating around the internet as well. In general, Wild Rift releases three champions every two months, thereby making it only a matter of time until they catch up with League of Legends.

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Andrei Van Roon, the brand new Head of League studio stated in an exclusive interview with Polygon: “a few years down the road, once we’ve got everyone’s favorite champions over and so on, but then we’ll want to explore — what does a Wild Rift-unique champion look like?”

Wild Rift’s roadmap is to eventually diverge further from League PC. But it’ll take time for this evolution to reach stages where the developers finally begin adding unique Wild Rift exclusive champions.

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As of now, there are 89 champions in Wild Rift and 161 champions in League of Legends. That’s a solid 72 champion difference, and if they continue averaging three champions every two months, it’ll take about 48 months, or four years, for Wild Rift to fully catch up with League of Legends in regards to its roster.

Star Guardian SennaWild Rift already has mobile exclusive skins, such as Star Guardian Senna.

Of course, League of Legends is also continuing to add champions as well — thereby this specific calculation is fickle to many variables. Perhaps Wild Rift is not interested in implementing all the champions, but rather most of them. Whatever the case, it’ll undoubtedly take a couple of years before Wild Rift catches up to League PC.

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What would a Wild rift exclusive champion even look like? There’s plenty of lore for the developers to pull from. But only time will truly tell. Hopefully, the champion designers for Wild Rift grow more and more comfortable with the mobile-catered mechanics, and manage to expand the MOBA in a never before seen way.