League of Legends is getting its first in-game season of 2025 soon and, as is Riot's tradition, there's a big and flashy new trailer with some gorgeous animation to accompany it. Namely, it has collaborated once again with Fortiche, the studio Riot threw $250 million [[link]] at to make Arcane, a bet which I'm pretty happy to say has paid off.
The venture's been so successful, in fact, that Riot's promised new shows featuring Demacia, Noxus, and Ionia. We know that Fortiche is involved, making this season's Noxus-themed trailer very interesting because, well, just look at the thing.
It's all looking too fleshed out to be a throwaway. New designs take a while to formulate—meaning smaller-scale animation projects like trailers and the like will try to keep the scope of what they actually show relatively limited. Unless Fortiche is incapable of keeping its cool (which is very possible) the sheer budget poured into this trailer's multiple locations has me suspicious we basically just got a trailer for a new show disguised as a game advertisement.
There's also the fact that there are several new redesigns for League of Legends champions, here. The two most obvious are Darius and Trundle, who we can see duking it out to a captive audience in the Freljord, but I'm pretty much certain that the woman we see fighting with twin blades is Katarina, a [[link]] Noxian assassin, pitched against creepy spider-woman Elise. The golden-collared mage at the end is likely LeBlanc, too, accompanied by Vladimir. All of this to say, you don't just redesign six iconic champions if you aren't planning on doing anything with 'em.
The timeline makes sense, too. Arcane showrunner Christian Linke also stated back in November 2024 that the next show's been in development for about a year, which is ample time to have a set of character designs and sets finalised for a trailer. I'd be shocked if the designs we're seeing here are going to change much, going forward.
Besides, not only is Mel just there, showing us her character's trajectory after the events of Arcane Season 2, LeBlanc outright states that "Piltover was a lesson" before hinting at some Black Rose cabal mischief. Folks, if I'm not looking at a teaser for Fortiche's next League spinoff, then I'm not sure what I'm looking at, at all.
Update: Riot has clarified that the new looks for Elise and Katarina in this cinematic are the Masque of the Black Rose Elise and Prestige Masque of the Black Rose Katarina skins. Riot also announced in today's dev update that LeBlanc is getting a visual update, which would explain the new look. So, impressive trailer, absolutely, but a preview of the upcoming Noxus show? It looks [[link]] like it might be hat-eatin' time.