League Of Legends ’ newest game mode is called “Invasion” and pits the Star Guardians up against monsters from the Void. From a post on the PBE forums , Riot developer DefaultChar introduced us to Valoran City Park and the challenges that need to be overcome. It will be a 5-person PVE game mode where each player takes the role of a Star Guardian who has to defend the city from a series of monster attacks. It will be the first League Of Legends game mode with a brand new map, villains and challenges to overcome.
Like Overwatch’s King’s Row Uprising, Invasion brings a whole new way to play League Of Legends. The user interface, abilities and items are still the same, but everything else changes. Champions respawn when an ally stands on their corpse for two seconds, different rooms have specific objectives that need to be completed and everything is trying to kill you. Forget turrets, minions and last hitting creeps, it’s all about killing “The Big One” at the end of the game. There’s even harder game modes for the guardian who thinks they can take on the world.
My favorite games have always been competitive. I’ve spent years of my life chained to my computer, honing my skills in League Of Legends, Overwatch and Hearthstone in a desperate drive to be the best. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t born with insane Korean mechanics or a powerful mind for strategy, I still feel the need to spend hours grinding away ELO or LP. Whenever a rotating game mode gets introduced where you just fight A.I. in one of these games, my week immediately gets better. I suck at playing but can’t stop, yet having to deal with the same terrible players over and over just puts me in a bad mood. When there’s nobody controlling my opponents but a bunch of lines of code created by some developer in California, I feel a sense of freedom overwhelm me.
Letting down teammates who will then let you down in return is the cycle of the online gamer. No matter what I do or how hard I train, I’ll still be paired up with a team of noobs whose only objective is to piss me off. It might not actually be that way, but that’s how I end up feeling after five lost games of Overwatch because the moronic Soldier:76 wouldn’t stand behind my Reinhardt shield. PVE game modes are an escape from all of the hassle, a chance to hone my skills without playing like my life is on the line. I could just play against A.I. bots all the time, but that’s just limbo for noobs and scammers who want to farm higher level accounts.
I’m beyond excited for Invasion. The toxicity of League Of Legends has kept me away from the game for a few months, but this might be my invitation to jump back in. Riot’s developers are trying something new here and I want to reward them for their good, hard work. Creating a new map and skins for all of League’s angriest bug monsters couldn’t have been easy, though I am a little sad that these Void skins won’t be getting released to anytime soon. I’ll make sure to share my thoughts on Invasion after I try the game mode later this week.
Are you going to play League of Legends’ Invasion game mode? Tell us in the comments.
