New game announcements are a dime a dozen but a new Los Angeles game development company called Riot Games hopes to make a mark in the industry with their first title, a fantasy online multiplayer action-RPG-strategy titled League of Legends. Yes, this mix of genres is making this title hard to categorize.

League of Legends involves the player (or as the game terms the Summoner) invoking one of dozens of different "Champions" as they battle online with other Champions in team matches. Champions can gain experience to get new abilities, items and such as they battle and even Summoners can gain rank to access new abilities.

As you can see from the screenshots, this title has a definite Warcraft influence in terms of its cartoony art style (Indeed the game's development team has members who worked on the popular Warcraft 3 mod DotA-Allstars). Riot Games promises that League of Legends will have a ton of multiplayer features including "matchmaking, stat tracking, clan support, anti-cheat systems, dedicated in-game ladders and Leaverbuster technology". There will also be a single player training mode with AI bots. League of Legends does not have a release date nor has pricing for the game been revealed. However a beta test of the game is expected to launch in 2009.