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.
A look at some of our plans for League after 2026. pic.twitter.com/vqsnBksg1YDecember 18, 2025
“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.
