Riot Games has unveiled what's currently being called Project A, a stylish new tactical shooter game for PC. Best known as the developers of the massively popular online battle arena title League of Legends, Riot Games has recently begun revealing a variety of new projects they have been working on behind the scenes, including a collaboration with Radiant Entertainment on a new fighting game which was first announced during Evo 2019.
League of Legends has more peak concurrent players than Steam's top ten games combined, making it one of the most popular PC e-sport games in the entire world. Although recent controversies surrounding free speech and political protest have driven the Tencent-owned company to release a statement on expressing personal views in its game broadcasts, even the League of Legends spin-off title Teamfight Tactics regularly sees 33 million monthly players. However, it's beginning to look like Riot doesn't want to just sit in one franchise forever.
During their 10th Anniversary celebration, Riot Games unveiled new footage of their upcoming shooter, currently titled Project A. All we know so far is that it is a competitive FPS set in a near-future Earth featuring a wide array of different characters, each with their own special abilities, developed in the Unreal Engine. According to a series of tweets by e-sports consultant Rod Breslau, the internal code name for the game is Project Ares and it is a spiritual successor to the wildly-popular PC shooter Counter-Strike. Breslau goes on to say players who have experienced the game in its early stages describe it as a combination of Overwatch and Counter-Strike.
According to Breslau's sources, Project Ares has been in development for several years now, with Riot Games even pulling former and current professional Counter-Strike and Overwatch players into their studio to test out the game. In the reveal video above, Project Ares' Executive Producer Anna Donlon states Riot hopes to make the title into a tactical shooter with more creativity, more expression, and more style than players are used to seeing, and emphasizes how important anti-cheat and zero-lag technologies are. Although no release date for the game is given, Donlon promises more information will be coming in 2020.
For a studio who has been so focused on one game series for so long, the jump into the tactical competitive shooter genre is intriguing. Judging from the reveal trailer, it seems like Riot Games knows what they're doing, as early video footage of Project Ares displays sleek, fast, and fun-looking combat. While players still have tons of questions, one of them likely about missing weapon crosshairs, this first early access look at the League of Legends developer's new FPS is definitely enough to get tactical shooter fans excited.
Source: YouTube(Riot Games)/Twitter(Slasher)