In the 2021 season, alongside major tournaments from the domestic to international levels, in-game events also drew significant attention from the League of Legends community. In mid-year, just as Spring 2021 was about to conclude, Riot introduced the Ruination event. This story narrates the invasion of Runeterra by the Ruined King Viego and the Black Mist. Opposing Viego to protect the world is the group of Sentinels of Light led by Lucian and Senna.
The event was introduced quite grandly, as not only Runeterra but Riot also designed for the Black Mist to spread across major cities worldwide. However, ultimately, contrary to expectations, the Ruination event ended up being quite brief and left no lasting impressions. Aside from Gwen and Senna having more screen time, the new champion Akshan, despite being the character who dealt the final blow to Viego, only appeared for a few minutes. Not to mention many names from the Sentinel group, such as Rengar, Riven, Irelia, and Pyke, were completely absent.
Recently, Riot continued to release a new product in the series of projects creating independent games based on the events and champions from their Runeterra universe. This product is the first major RPG game of League of Legends called Ruined King: A League of Legends Story. It is a turn-based attack game where players control a group of characters to find and defeat Viego. Overall, the content of the game is not much different from the previously appeared Sentinels of Light event, and immediately, the League of Legends community began to compare.
According to the majority opinion, gamers acknowledge that the story of Ruined King is much more complete than that of the Ruination – VBAS event. Although not heavily promoted, it is fuller and more refined. The game gathers many characters and cleverly builds the story suitable for players who enjoy researching the narratives in League of Legends. Meanwhile, while VBAS built everything quite bland, including the conclusion, Ruined King almost fulfills everything that VBAS lacked. Some gamers even “took the opportunity” to condemn Riot for supposedly only building VBAS to sell skins while many characters closely related to the Black Mist were not even introduced (Yorick, Kalista, Maokai, Hecarim).
The release of Ruined King, which was warmly received, is a success for Riot but also exposes the shortcomings of previous events. However, with the successful construction of Ruined King, many gamers hope that in the future, the “creator” of League of Legends will better utilize the abundant resources from the Runeterra realm they have created to deliver more engaging, grander, and more complete events than before.
Currently, gamers can officially purchase Ruined King from various stores, including Nintendo Switch, Steam, and Epic Games Store.