The Free League of Legends

Earlier today, Riot Games announced additional details for its upcoming persistent online action game, League of Legends. The largest bit of news associated with the game is that League of Legends would be free for PC gamers when the game is released in September 2009. According to Brandon Beck, co-founder and CEO of Riot Games, "One of our goals at Riot has been to set a high quality bar for core games that are available for free online as we believe that a relentless focus on delivering tremendous value to online communities will earn player loyalty," Brandon Beck, co-founder and CEO, Riot Games, said. "League of Legends is being built as a highly competitive core game that we believe will change many people's minds about the type and caliber of games that can be offered for free."

Additionally, new details were released about the Summoner system, which will govern the first part of gameplay within League of Legends. Players take on the role of Summoners, who call champions to fight for them in combat. To aid their champions, Summoners can use spells and runes to further influence the battle. At the end of every match, each Summoner receives Influence points, which can be used to unlock runes. These items enhance the power of characters significantly.

There will be a Collector's Pack for the game that is slated to be released at launch for $29.99 and will contain two unique champion skins, additional runes, characters and Riot Points. Players that pre-order the Collector's Pack at the League of Legends website, GameStop or Best Buy will also receive an exclusive Champion skin. Players that do choose to purchase League of Legends will earn what's known as Riot Points, which will be used to unlock customization options for every single champion, but won't have a strength of power advantage over players.

We spoke with Mark Merrill, president of Riot Games, to gain additional information about the decision to release the game for free and some of the other elements of today's announcement. Since today was the first time that Riot Points had ever been mentioned, we wondered what the visual enhancements would be. Merrill pointed out the pre-order page showed off alternate costumes for some of the champions. "We will be creating a number of unique Champion skins to give players the opportunity for cool diversity among their favorite characters – as well as to reward players based on achievement, like winning tournaments," Merrill mentioned. Apparently, beta testers will also receive a unique champion skin, and the community will have an opportunity to vote on skins going forward.

Clearly, with paying and non-paying players for League of Legends, it raised two questions. The first was about balancing the gameplay with players possibly earning stronger items by spending money. The second was whether Riot considered establishing a two tiered system for the ultra competitive player that was willing to pay to play against other paying challengers. "No. As a competitive game, it is extremely important for us to not sell power to players and we don't want to fragment the community into "paying players" and "non-paying players" – both are important to us," Merrill stated.

We also asked about the Collector's pack and whether the runes within the pack would provide any kind of advantage over the players that attempted to play for free, but were told that the pack was "really just providing a bundle of content for people who want to get kickstarted into the game and who want the exclusive skins."

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