League of Legends: Wild Rift vs Summoner’s Rift — What are the Differences?

If you’ve been as excited for League of Legends: Wild Rift as we’ve been, then you might remember when we broke the news during Riot’s tenth-anniversary stream for their flagship game. We briefly mentioned that the mobile and console title was going to be a variation on the base game, but now we’ve had some time to go over what we know so let’s have at it. Here’s our breakdown of League of Legends Wild Rift vs Summoner’s Rift and what the differences are.

League of Legends Wild Rift vs Summoner’s Rift: What are the Differences?

As we mentioned, Wild Rift was announced last week and it was immediately confirmed that the title wouldn’t be a direct port of League of Legends to consoles. Instead, it would be a scaled down version of the game that would be different in a number of ways. We’ve listed those for you below:

• Fewer base defenses – Wild Rift is going to have a different map compared to the base game, and there won’t be inhibitors or turrets in one’s base. Turrets also won’t have plating, because Riot is anticipating that games will be around 20 minutes long.
• Map layout – as you can tell from the existing turret changes, there’s going to be a different map in Wild Rift. We expect that the new additions to the Summoner’s Rift map coming in the preseason won’t be made to this other version. 
• No wards – There won’t be wards in Wild Rift. Instead, there will be certain areas to capture that grant vision over swathes of the map and teams will have to fight over them.
• Reduced champion pool – As mentioned at the announcement of this console version, it was made clear that Wild Rift was going to start out with a much smaller champion pool. We’re looking at 40 of Riot’s most popular champs, with more over time.
• New models and animations – The champs that have made the cut for Wild Rift are getting updates to their skins and animations that we’ve seen. It also looks like they’re going to get unique victory poses which are entirely new. 
• Level cap – There’s going to be a different level cap for Wild Rift. This is going to be level 15, owing to the shorter timeframe of the matches, compared to 18 for Summoner’s Rift. While we’re not quite sure how this will all pan out in terms of balance and gold acquisition, this is a confirmed change.

Here’s what we’ve got in terms of League of Legends Wild Rift vs Summoner’s Rift and their differences. As we learn more about the former from Riot in the lead-up to its rollout, we’ll make sure that we update you on the latest information. Got an interest in everything League of Legends? Check out this neat live-action LoL art that we found.