by Donavin Sulser
Gaming Editor
Riot games announced recently that they are going to have a spectator mode functional now for their very popular game, “League of Legends” for the PC. This functionality has been asked by the fans for months as League of Legends a very popular game, is just as fun to watch as it is to play. However, what will this do to game play? How will this affect it as an E-Sport? All I can say is that there is nothing but high hopes for Riot and their masterpiece commonly referred to as League.
League, for those who don’t know is an action real-time strategy game where players are formed into 2 even teams of Champions in a 3 v 3 or 5 v 5 format. Each player begins at opposite sides of a map, fighting each other in intense combat. The goal is to destroy the other team’s nexus, located at their base. What makes this game above and beyond the others is that it currently has over 94 champions to choose from giving players an ever changing game as far as battles are concerned.
The spectator mode couldn’t come at a better time, during the second half of 2011, Riot announced that its registered users doubled from its July announcement from 4 million active players a month to 11.5 million active monthly players. This increase is more than likely due to the success of their season one and season two tournaments, which had a $100,000 bounty. Adding spectators will allow a better use of the tournaments for both live and at-home-viewing.
The brilliance of spectator mode is that it’s not the typical use that has been seen before in gaming where you just watch what is happening at the moment. With the spectator feature, now you can even go back in time to see past events and jump back to real time; forgot who got killed first? No problem, leap back and forth with ease.
Premier matches going on at the moment….want to watch it? You can with spectator mode. This feature will just skyrocket players in their love for the game as they can watch the ‘Best of the Best’ (cheesy 80’s movie reference) players go head-to-head. I for one love to play Rammus aka the Armored Armadillo and what better way to get my game up then watching the best who play him. I think I could spend hours watching teams go back and forth that I wouldn’t get enough time to play myself. Riot is really making a chef-d’oeuvre of a game.
But what about cheating with using spectator? What about that troll of a guy who thinks well I’ll just use spectator mode to help a friend out on what the other team is doing? This was always an issue back in the Counter Strike days and Lord knows I’ve been that troll of a guy. The masterminds at Riot inserted a clause that all matches that spectators are watching are 3 minutes behind what is happening on the battle field. Basta-er-Brilliant!!! Now what you will get is friends in separate rooms yelling yes about the same events just one will be warping back in time faster than Marty McFly’s 1.21 gigawatts.
This game is turning out be as big as the games coming from Blizzard Entertainment, that’s right I said it. It is true that Riot has one of the premier games and has a certain something, a spark, a certain je ne sais quoi. That spark of something more and something special that will turn video games into as mainstream as poker on television. That spark is a game worthy of view, just as fun to play and exciting to watch. I predict that League of Legends will be the legendary game that puts gaming on the ESPN map.