League of Legends: Wild Rift is Riot Games' effort to bring its incredibly popular MOBA League of Legends to mobile devices. In many ways, Riot has been successful in the endeavor. But balancing the needs of the mobile audience with Riot's competition-driven goals is an evolving process. Riot now delivered on one of its goals, with the developer announcing that it has fully re-implemented in-game voice chat for premade teams in League of Legends: Wild Rift across all supported regions.
Riot first tried to deliver voice chat for pre-made teams as part of League of Legends: Wild Rift in the MOBA's 2.4 update, which arrived in July 2021. However, voice chat's technical implementation led to performance issues and a variety of unforeseen bugs. Riot disabled it quickly after, but the intention has always been able to bring it back as fast as possible. It tried to bring it back with patch 2.6, but again had a technical issue. It was understandably frustrating for everyone, but Riot remained focused.
With League of Legends: Wild Rift's 3.0 update, released in January, Riot followed through and brought back voice chat -- but with a catch. Having been twice burnt by releasing voice chat early due to technical issues, Riot decided to take a more cautionary approach with the latest release. As such, update 3.0 only delivered voice chat to players in the Americas as a "test," with other regions to follow. Riot declared it a beta test until it was confident that the build was stable.
The good news is that Riot's rollout of voice chat for League of Legends: Wild Rift is now complete. In a message posted to the official Twitter account for Wild Rift, Riot confirmed that voice chat is available in all regions. The bad news is that, technically, Riot still considers voice chat to be in testing rather than fully launched.
As for what it means for voice chat to still be testing, it isn't entirely clear. From all appearances, the "test" will be the same as the full release in terms of features. Riot is simply calling the current state of the feature a test so that players understand some issues may still be present. Patches will, if necessary, fix any remaining bugs before Riot declares it fully released.
In the meantime, League of Legends: Wild Rift players should be able to use and enjoy voice chat to their heart's content. Again, it's only available to pre-made teams, and, again, it may have some bugs left, but it's a great option, nonetheless. Expect further updates from Riot in the weeks and months to come.
League of Legends: Wild Rift is available now on iOS and Android.