Riot green-lights League of Fighters
Riot Games gives League of Fighters and other fan "Projects" the thumbs up.
I love Riot. Seriously, it maintains its game like no other and is the largest supporter of eSports out there; it's great. I also enjoy fighting games, so I could hardly contain my excitement when I saw the League of Fighters trailer. Now developer Instaburst has announced Riot Games have given the go-ahead to use their IP. Riot, you’re awesome!
League of Fighters is a fan made 2D fighting game featuring your favorite Champions from League of Legends, Teemo too. The initial trailer only showed Annie as a playable character, but it did look quite spiffing.
The game will look extremely familiar to Summoners, featuring the same abilities as LoL, with cooldowns and all. I find it quite interesting that each player can see the other's cooldown times, or that there are cooldowns at all. It removes a lot of the guessing games that make fighters so exciting.
While they have the green light to use the League of Legends IP, Riot has, of course, enforced that the game stays free-to-play, though they are allowed to take ad revenue (more below). Afterall, Riot owes their existence to the original DotA, which was a mod for Warcraft III itself.
The game uses the FM2K engine, which is the same engine as other like projects My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic, Pokemon Type Wild, or Vanguard Princess, who unfortunately did not get the red carpet treatment.
And with one of the largest communities in gaming at the moment, Riot is eager to encourage fans to embark on their own “Projects”, as stated in this addition to their legal page:
"We’ll start with our golden rule – you can use League of Legends IP as the basis for a fan project that you’re giving away for free or that’s only generating ad revenue (we’ll refer to this type of free fan project as a “Project”), as long as you comply with the guidelines outlined below for using our IP (the “Guidelines”). As a matter of fact, as long as you comply with our Guidelines, we think it’s great if you create awesome, free and original content for League of Legends fans."
Check out the fan-tastic trailer below:
If you want to follow development of the game, or get directly involved by joining the team (150 applicants already!), you can find more information on the Instaburst website. It seems they are already gaining quite a following, with support from various parties.
League of Legends is the self-proclaimed most popular online game in the world, it is free to download and free to play, so jump in and join the millions of other gamers.