The esports landscape has been constantly adapting over the course of the wild ride that’s been the year 2020. And now, the League of Legends World Championship, which begins next week, is the latest tournament to be affected by the looming global circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
For this year’s tournament, Riot Games is taking an approach that makes the event far more remote with less interaction between many of the on-camera personalities from the represented regions.
For starters, all of the casting and commentating will be done remotely from three different sites: Los Angeles, Seoul, and Berlin. This implies that casters from different regions won’t have any crossovers at the tournament and all of the matches will be picked up by at least one individual broadcast team.
Beyond the in-game approach, Riot also announced that “Worlds Countdown,” the event’s pre-show, and “Worlds Cooldown,” the event’s post-show, will take place at the LEC Studio in Berlin and the LCS Studio in Los Angeles, respectively.
“In short, we’ve got plenty of coverage going into what is sure to be another action-packed Worlds,” LCS host James “Dash” Patterson said during this morning’s Worlds Group Draw show.
The multi-city event will focus mainly on supplying both in-game and out-of-game coverage from Berlin and Los Angeles. Interaction with the host city of Shanghai is sure to be plentiful, as well as additional insight from the LCK team in Seoul.
Additionally, “most analyst desk segments and remote interviews” at the event will be done remotely between Berlin and Shanghai, the site of all of the tournament’s games, according to Riot.
Despite the ongoing global circumstances, Worlds 2020 presses on. And although the overall experience is sure to be different, to say the least, the presentation of the event could very well be just like “the real thing.”
Worlds 2020 begins on Friday, Sept. 25.
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