Riot Games recently shared their plans for Winter in League of Legends which may disappoint League players once again.
Up until season 9, there was an annual holiday-themed Snowdown Showdown event that brought the wintery theme to Summoner’s Rift in almost every season. The event had its own set of skin line with an option to enable snow effect in the game as well.
However, in Season 9, instead of the winter event Riot brought some major changes to the Rift. They introduced Rise of the Elements where the Summoner’s Rift now changes based on the third dragon.
With so many new changes, for the first time in a long time Riot has excluded the Winter event from League of Legends.
“The map updates we’ve made for events like Snowdown and Arcade have always been fun for players (and honestly, for us as well). The downside is that they don’t last very long and often lack depth,” Riot Games said regarding the Winter event. “Instead of doing a handful of these smaller map reskins every year, we’ve instead been focusing our efforts on creating more immersive environments that players get to experience for a longer period of time.”
And now as the Season 10 is almost halfway through, a lot of players are again asking Riot Games if there will be Winter in the Season 10 or in the upcoming future.
Replying to the question on the latest dev blog, Riot Games said, “The answer is maybe, but we don’t have any plans to at the moment.”
So, based on Riot’s reply it is now very unlikely that Winter will come back in near future let alone in Season 10. Instead of bringing it back Riot is continuously trying to make the Summoner’s Rift as immersive as possible.
Regarding why they are not planning to bring the event any time soon, Riot said “we’d like to remind you that the Rift LITERALLY CATCHES ON FIRE. (And grows flowers. And rocks. And… wind?) But in all seriousness, we’d need to make snowy versions of all four Elemental Rifts as well as snowy alcove areas.”
While Riot figures out the technical challenge, we can expect even if the Winter event doesn’t come back permanently, Riot will bring it back in the upcoming future as temporary maps to support the event at least.
