Hot off the success of Arcane season 2, Riot has a "slate of different projects" it's exploring, but you probably shouldn't expect anything anytime soon
"We have over 160 champions in our game. There¡¯s tons of them where I¡¯m like, I want to know their story."
Yes, Arcane is over now, but for Riot and Fortiche there's plenty of work to be done on future shows set in the world of League of Legends.
We've known for a little while now that Arcane would be wrapping up after its second season, but that also came with the promise that developer Riot and animation studio Fortiche had plans to expand its universe with more projects. What those projects might be is still anyone's guess, but in a recent interview with Polygon, Arcane showrunner and co-creator Christian Linke shared that the developer and animation studio have been discussing where it could go next. "We have over 160 champions in our game. There’s tons of them where I’m like, I want to know their story," Linke said.
"Now is the time, luckily, that we also can start thinking about that and dream big. So we have a slate of different projects we’re exploring, nothing’s in production yet, but we’re really building stories of all these different tonalities and they should be very different. They should not feel just like, OK, they should be their own style, their own tone. So that’s the next step for us." It's not just about new stories that appeals to Linke though, as the showrunner is also interested in exploring different tones and genres too.
"We haven’t done enough yet for the whimsical tone of League; Arcane is pretty dark. But there’s a lot of fun characters. There’s the Lulus, the Teemos, the Amumus, the Poppies, the Tristans. What do we do for those? And I think I would definitely want to take things [in a new show] into the extremes, like the different genres. What are we going to do in horror? What are we going to do in more abstract, more artistic things? That’s the real power of animation. You’re not grounded by what reality is. So we should take advantage of that."
Arcane has been in development for a long while, and even the second season took three years to come out after the first, so any other shows will probably be a few years away, but all you League of Legends fans have a lot to look forward to at the very least.