A lot of time has passed since the last dev blog on game modes that featured the popular Ultimate Spellbook, and the promise of Nexus Blitz for 2022 (Which still hasn’t happened!).
Despite of the success of Ultimate Spell Book, there were several complaints alluding to the lack of “love” for League’s game modes. For that reason coming to 2023, Riot switched gears and even moved people from their New Champions Team to the Game Modes team to make progress on their projects.
2V2(2V2) New LoL Game Mode details - It's going to have Augments and Deathmatches
Talking about projects, the Game Mode team finally revealed more details on the new LoL game mode coming this summer.
First of all, it is going to consist of four teams of two, battling each other in rounds of deathmatch battles (very similar to the ones at Nexus Blitz).
Over the game champions will progress in levels, gain items, and special power called Augments (Like the TFT ones but League-ified). After losing enough rounds, a team is eliminated, until one team is the winner. An interesting aspect is that the eliminated team can queue immediately after losing, so no more waiting time between games.
A early version is planned to be released in Summer - Courtesy Riot Games®
No more rotating game modes until Summer
In order to get the new LoL game mode ready for Summer, the Game mode team is stopping the support for existing rotating modes (URF, ARURF, Spellbook, OFA). This means that when future patches are live, it won't be possible to play these modes.
So we won’t be able to play URF matches with friends for a while. Still, they did mention that once the new mode rolls in, they will be preparing the rotating modes for the later part of the year (even possibly bringing back Nexus Blitz)
Preseason ARAM changes - Successes and Failures
The Dev Team has new things coming for the LoL flagship casual mode All Random-All Mid (ARAM). After the success of Preseason changes, especially the Frost gate, there are still things to be done. This includes problems with the balance of champions in ARAM, length of games and mainly the Tower Rubble mechanic.
The good news is that they are going to tone down or flat out remove the Tower Rubble (Broken structure after taking down turrets) after many complaints, there’s no date for this though.
In regards to ARAM champion balance, there’s a lot of experimentation to be done. Despite the success of the Frost Gate, addressing one of the eternal pain points of ARAM - poke, heals and range being OP, and melee champs being bad - is a challenge. The longer death timers and numbers aren’t as easy to balance for the better either.
One change that is for sure coming soon is the return of death timers to 12.22 numbers. So if you play a lot of ARAM, expect it to get better over the next few patches.
