Riot Games is most famous for its incredibly popular MOBA game League of Legends. The game is arguably even more popular than its strongest rival – Dota 2 with a player base of around 100 million. With anime-ish graphics and easy to play mechanics, League of Legends has attracted great attention worldwide.

Riot Game Announce 01
The most popular action-packed and fast-paced MOBA game in the world

While Riot is almost exclusively known for the publisher of League of Legends, the gaming company never developed any other game titles. The only apparent stuff other than LoL Riot Games has created was TeamFight Tactics – also a game mode in LoL itself. It seems like the company has stayed well in its comfort zone for this whole 10 years.

Riot Game Announce 02
Riot Games has done well with their favorite MOBA game

A new path

However, that is no longer the case. In the recent major announcement by Riot Games, the company has announced various new projects with many different genres. Among them, “Project A” stands out as the first-ever FPS game by the MOBA game developer.

The game at first looks perfectly normal like a Counter-Strike game with a slight difference in graphics. However, Riot Games is even more ambitious as they don’t simply “copy” the concept of FPS games from other titles. Instead, their FPS games will be a “character-based tactical shooter”. Doesn’t this ring a bell? You must be thinking about Overwatch right now.

It has a large cast of characters, each with their own unique abilities. In the trailer, we can see a character throwing some green smoke to block out the vision of the opponent. It is still unclear if this is just regular “smoke” like that in CS:GO or the character’s innate ability. Seconds later, the character seems to summon some kind of magic to revive his teammate. Is this a hint at the Battle Royale genre this title is heading for?

Riot Game Announce 03
Being able to fling a knife at your opponent is a pretty cool stuff

A promising future

Various more cool stuff are also revealed in the trailer. The character seems to be able to summon 5 knives and fire off one at a time. The one point Riot hit it right is the anti-cheat system they promise. As we all know, FPS games are notorious for their wall-hacks and aim-bots. If Riot can actually pull off what they promise, it would be great to finally see one FPS title free of hacks.

The game also draws lots of experience from Counter-Strike as one of the game developers for Riot is Sal “Volcano” Garozzo - the creator of de_cache.

The release date for the game has yet to be announced. However, we won’t have to wait for too long as the project will come out soon in 2020. Obviously, this is not Half-Life 3 by Steam.