After waiting patiently for many months, League of Legends fans are finally getting another game mode, just in time for the summer.
Riot Games has introduced Arena as the newest experience for summoners to enjoy, featuring a deathmatch-like game mode with four teams of two battling on a whole new set of maps with new locales and builds. These teams will fight in rotating 2v2 combat rounds until only one team remains, similar to the Double Up system in Teamfight Tactics.
Like TFT, each team has collective health that depletes every time that they lose a round. A team is eliminated when their collective health drops to zero and below, while the last team left with health wins the entire game. Unlike Double Up, however, players will never play against AI opponents, so if there is an uneven amount of teams left, some teams will be given a bye round and have to wait.
Eliminated players, on the other hand, may leave the game early, and immediately queue up for a match with their fellow partner. As a result, Arena will be a fresh way to enjoy League with shorter game times and more casual gameplay than a normal Summoner’s Rift or ARAM match.
There are two phases in Arena: the preparation phase and the combat phase. In each preparation phase, players are given the same set amount of gold to buy items in the shop, with all of the Mythics and Legendary items equalized to the same price to ensure that there won’t be any snowballing in the game.
Players can also choose an augment to power their champion up, which can all range from normal, wacky, and everywhere in between. These will vastly change the way that a champion plays, like giving a champion Veigar passive, or having a Sivir boomerang shoot from the player every eight seconds.
You can even gain access to Nexus Blitz’s Battle Sled, which places the champion in a sled that can be driven around the map, while also being a weapon that can be driven into enemies for some damage and a knock-up. Ultimately, these augments are the life-blood of the mode, and should give players endless combinations to try over the course of the mode.
After the preparation phase, players are transported to one of four different maps created for Arena. Each new map has been built for 2v2 combat, but offer varying experiences based on the different terrain and spaces provided. There are also 10 champion cameos that randomly appear during some rounds, where Soul Fighter champions cause stage hazards for all players to look out for.
Lastly, Arena will also have its own ranked system, similar to TFT‘s Hyper Roll mode. There are five tiers to achieve based off your Arena MMR, which should help keep players coming back to play this new mode over the course of the season.
This game mode is thematically linked to the Soul Fighter summer event, which has been highly-requested by the player base ever since the dawn of other event-linked modes like Star Guardian’s Invasion, Odyssey’s Extraction, and the ever-popular Nexus Blitz mode that ran during the 2018 summer.
