Teamfight Tactics turns 5 and steps out of the shadow of the League

There have been many game modes League of Legends, and few of them survive in the long term. A lucky few get into rotation and appear as short events for a bit of fun before being removed again. One game mode was lucky enough to escape that fate; it is now a standalone project that has been abandoned Competition‘s shadow. Team Fight Tactics turns 5 and the game mode remains one of Riot’s best bets yet.

Team Fight Tactics pits eight players against each other in a technically competitive but extremely cold battle. Players are offered units with which they can create basic teams that automatically battle it out – first against computer-controlled bots and then against each other. As matches progress, players will have access to a store and occasionally a carousel of more units.

“Team Fight TacticsWhen it launched as a game mode with a relatively small team, it was incredibly well received by our players,” said Peter Whalen, game director of Team Fight Tactics, speaking to Polygon. “There were so many people who tried it TFT and then kept doing it.” Today, Team Fight Tactics has a monthly player base of around 33 million – not as high as its parent game Competitionbut certainly a respectable fan base.

For a totally new player who is not familiar with the genre or Competition yourself, Team Fight Tactics can be confusing to retrieve. There is a high learning curve if you want to master all the intricacies, and if you are not familiar with it CompetitionThe huge cast of characters can make it difficult to recognize the potential strengths of the characters collected in the carousel. But there are a few important aspects of the game that are very easy to understand: If you get three of the same unit, it is upgraded to level 2. If you get nine units, that champion becomes level 3, making it a champion in every combat is a groundbreaking presence.

It doesn’t take much knowledge to take advantage of that kind of thing, but it feels great to do it – and the matches are short enough that a loss rarely feels bad. “The game is structured so that there are a lot of small wins,” Whalen said. “There are many moments where you have a small victory: you win a battle, you have a three-star champion, you get the perfect items, the perfect Augment, something great happens in the carousel. And they feel very good.”

The Team Fight Tactics developers change the game’s selection and mechanics regularly with “sets” rotating every four months. Each season has a specific theme. Dragonlands, for example, has a large number of dragon-related characters that you can get from skins like Dragon Trainer Tristana, Dragon Guardian Galio, and Dragon Master Swain. Each new theme is an excuse to try out a whole new set of mechanics built on the foundation of the core game.

“Every season is a new puzzle to solve,” Whalen said. “It really creates a new and unique experience that is one of the most successful things we’ve seen from our players. People have really latched onto solving the new puzzles TFT presents.”

I personally played and enjoyed it Team Fight Tactics at launch. Finally I walked away and switched to Hearthstone‘s Battlegrounds mode for a while before I drop my autobattler habit altogether. Years later, I absentmindedly clicked a Team Fight Tactics cinematic in my Twitter feed. It was so tightly produced that it was stunning, especially considering how crazy it was.

Competition has been stupid before, like the Pentakill music video where Mordekaiser kicks Teemoor if you want to go way back, the old-school Journal of Justice sharing in-universe articles written about the robot Blitzcrank’s dating service, or Veigar stealing a hot air balloon at the Bandle City Fair. But Riot Games has also built a very versatile media ecosystem League of Legendsincluded Legends of Runeterra And 2XKO. Riot Forge, which sadly closed earlier this year, delivered a variety of indie games set in the world of Competition. The second season of Arcane will be released in November. Riot Games also has a whole music scene, with debuting virtual bands like K/DA, True Damage and Heartsteel. Team Fight Tactics is able to draw from all that material and maintain its downright ridiculous tone – it can even add something Arcane villain Silco, or a charming guy like brewmaster Kobuko from Red Fox.

All in all it’s a much friendlier and more welcoming environment then League of Legends, and a matching community has emerged. The general vibe the team is going for is fan fiction, Whalen says. Silly little mascots like Choncc and Pengu are popular Competition characters, which gives the atmosphere that when the Competition the matches are over, the kayfabe falls and all the champions can be friends. Team Fight Tactics can borrow freely Competition‘s growing library of content, and that’s led to the one-off new game mode splitting into a truly standalone project under Riot’s umbrella.