When League of Legends: The Wild Rift was first announced in October 2019, I joined the chorus of people who suddenly thought, “It’s time! “. “‘ I even spent a lot of time playing the Wild Rift alphas that were available in various Asian territories, playing cat-and-mouse games to outrun VPN riot detection systems. It’s a long time to play a mobile game, but the feeling of a “real” MOBA in 15 minutes has always been magical for Wild Rift and Arena of Valor. There are no significant similarities between Wild Rift and the league itself, they are separate game economies with unlockables tied to each. With these new character models, Wild Rift looks oddly better on my iPhone 12 Pro than the “full” game on my fully upgraded gaming PC. I wish Riot had handled the unlockables for the PC and mobile versions of the game differently, because this issue came up in every conversation with League friends who were encouraged to try the game. Summoner’s Rift, the map on which the main game mode takes place, has been tweaked several times, but it’s hard to imagine how much technical debt for a game as old and complex as LoL has accumulated over the years. They use these new high-resolution character models for all sorts of things in the game, making the menus more vivid than in the “real” League, where the same features can be found on PC. League of Legends on mobile has a bit of an odd history, as Riot has claimed for years that the game can’t be played on smartphones whenever anyone asks about it. There seems to be a lot of potential drama when a mobile game looks better, has new code, gets new stuff, and there’s no way to satisfy longtime PC players with multi-platform rewards. Savage Rift is League of Legends with as few compromises as possible to make it easily playable on touchscreen and reasonable session times on mobile. Jared asked me if I was interested in covering League of Legends: Wild Rift beta, which TouchArcade was invited to do, knowing full well that I’m a complete degenerate when it comes to anything League of Legends-related and that I wouldn’t be able to say no. During the Q&A session I had with Riot, they stressed that not only is this a brand new game, but also new exclusive content such as exclusive mobile skins and game champions. Savage Rift breaks all that down by offering a brand new game that Riot built from the ground up.