In a video posted to League of Legends blog platform Nexus, Riot Games narrative lead Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street outlined the developer’s plans for game lore in 2019.
The announcement video included some important projects, such as new comic series as part of Riot’s ongoing partnership with Marvel. But there was one short announcement in the video that stuck out to us as one of the most important things mentioned. Riot is planning to release physical and digital copies of short novels, actual books, based on in-game lore in 2019.
“One of the main goals of this year is to release both physical and digital books,” Ghostcrawler said in today’s video. “We’re starting with a novella focused on Demacia, and we’ll continue to create new content throughout 2019 that we’re really excited to share with you.”
Although Riot’s partnership with Marvel Entertainment to create comic series set in Runeterra is groundbreaking both for League’s own lore development and for the gaming industry at large, comics had still been done before. Riot had already released several issues throughout the last few years for Ryze, Darius, and more, and this Marvel partnership seemed like more of a logical next step rather than something completely new. Books, on the other hand, haven’t been done before.
While they won’t be full-feature novels, these short novels, or novellas, will still be sold as physical copies for all interested fans. Riot didn’t give any details on how long these stories will be, exactly, but it’s safe to assume that they’ll be longer than Riot’s lengthiest stories on Universe (which can get pretty lengthy), the official lore platform, but not quite as long as normal novels.
With the announcement of novels and even more comic series in development, the lore of League should take an unprecedented step forward in 2019.
