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Riot Games promised Nexus Blitz for 2022. Now, they're apologizing for breaking their word due to the game mode being broken.
No Nexus Blitz this Year
Last year, the League of Legends dev team took to the official blog to talk about the state of game modes, including Nexus Blitz. In it, they mentioned that Nexus Blitz won't be retiring, but it's behind in play rate compared to URG, One for All, and Ultimate Spellbook. This caused Riot to not bring back the game mode as frequently in 2021 but said would adjust it to put Nexus Blitz “in line with what makes game modes like OFA and URF so enticing,” with the ultimate goal of placing it back in 2022.
Unfortunately, Nexus Blitz would remain unseen for over a year. Players kept looking forward the entire year, as it's a nice detachment from the regular Summoner's Rift and Howling Abyss maps. The League of Legends Dev Team finally broke their silence about the game mode's disappearance.
While we previously announced that we would end the year with Nexus Blitz, we’re not going to be able to bring it back at this time. Unfortunately pieces of the NB UI experience were broken by unrelated work on a different part of the game.
— League of Legends Dev Team (@LoLDev) December 7, 2022
“While we previously announced that we would end the year with Nexus Blitz, we’re not going to be able to bring it back at this time. Unfortunately pieces of the NB UI experience were broken by unrelated work on a different part of the game,” the dev team wrote on the first tweet of a thread. “Since we made the original promise in 2021 to bring back NB, the League team lost some key people that would’ve been involved in this. Rehiring for roles and onboarding new members takes time that impacts respective projects.”
It seems not only in-game changes factored into Nexus Blitz “breaking,” but also external things like members of the Riot team involved in Nexus Blitz' development leaving. They then followed with something that was dreaded but expected: “That means the amount of work to fix NB will take longer than we had hoped, and isn't something we were able to complete in time for the end of 2022. So we had to make the call to not run it.”
They then apologized for breaking their word, saying that they “know this is not the news you were hoping for, as players have been asking for the return of NB, and we apologize for being unable to make that happen for right now.”
The dev team gave further reasoning why Nexus Blitz has been placed in the back burner for 2022. “The recent ARAM updates were our priority for live modes work and we have plans for other areas both old and new. We will have a more detailed update on what caused the incident, as well as the future of modes for League early next year,” they said.
Many members of the community were unhappy to hear this, as some of them were still holding out hope that the game mode would go live for the last few weeks of the year. There was also no new game mode that went live this year, unless you count the re-skinned Unsealed Spellbook as one. This churned further unrest within the community.
But, other members of the League community were delighted to know that the game mode has not been forgotten. The fact that the Dev Team acknowledged their broken promise and will go into further detail in the future means work is being done, or will be done, on it.
