League of Legends is going through quite the makeover this pre-season, with a brand new ranked system, big changes to runes, and a lot more. One of the changes included in the “a lot more” is something players have been requesting for a long time—a new loading screen.
As it turns out, Riot was listening, and the new loading screen is just about ready to hit the PBE for player testing. It’s wildly different than what players are used to.
For starters, we’re finally getting a team chat function included in the new loading screens—one of the most-requested features. With this finally in play, teams should be able to coordinate early game strategies before even hitting the Rift. Like, say, a level one invade, early gank, or even a dance-off in the river. Anything’s possible.
That’s probably the biggest feature, but there are a ton of smaller ones, too, and they’re all packed full of info that you can use to ready yourself for the coming game. For example, you’ll now be able to hover over enemy and ally runes to get a brief explanation of the rune’s function. Now, if you don’t know what a rune does before the game starts, you can find out a little easier.
Also, you’ll be able to flip each player’s card around to see some of their stats on whatever champion they’re playing. If you flip around the enemy Zed’s card to reveal they have 50,000 mastery points on Zed, you can be mostly sure they know what they’re doing on that champ.
One of the smaller changes is the new little info carousel on the side of the screen, which will contain lore tidbits, short gameplay tips, and other less important things that add flavor and depth to the load screen.
Overall, this is a massive improvement to the extremely stale and barebones load screens we’ve had in League for a long time. If you want to get your hands on them early, you’ll need a PBE account, but we imagine they’ll go live over the course of the pre-season, so you won’t have to wait long regardless.
