Riot Games will soon launch its new Battle Training Tutorial, and not only is this program a bundle of great information, but it also showcases some great things that can be accomplished in League of Legends.

As a longtime gamer who has played something from every gaming genre out there, there are some game genres that are quite easy to pick up and run with; like first-person shooters with their aim and shoot mentality. While others are just so deep, like EVE Online and Final Fantasy XI, that first-time gamers can feel overwhelmed in even trying to play. Nothing, however, prepared me for the sheer amount of confusion I experienced when I first attempted to play DotA Allstars. Consider the facts: DotA Allstars literally defined its own genre, because it featured game mechanics that no other game used (minions, lanes, towers, denying, a unique per-game leveling system and so on). Because of this, and given DotA's immense 75+ champion pool selection in addition to over four dozen different items and recipes, when I decided to try being competitive at DotA, it took me well over three months of reading and playing to get to a decent level of skill.

I consider myself lucky that I had become so enamored with DotA in my early gaming life, because it helped pave the way for me to easily move on to games like League of Legends. These days, however, given LoL's incredible amount of popularity, there are bound to be thousands of new players who simply have no idea what the DotA gaming genre is in the slightest, and if it took me three months to really pick up the game using all the learning tools I could find, how much more difficult must it be for someone to learn everything that League of Legends has to offer if they don't have the time to do all that? Luckily, Riot Games seems to be up to that challenge as they will soon unveil their new "Battle Training" Tutorial with the aim of introducing new players to all of the basic mechanics they need to get into LoL. Featuring a fully-voiced tutorial complete with some new in-game mechanics, like a unique questing system (!) to guide players along, I decided to get an early peek at the new training regimen Riot Games has planned for budding Summoners in the near future.

The tutorial starts out in the champion select screen, where players are given the full run-down of masteries, summoner skills and runebooks, while also being offered a selection of three basic champions: Ashe, Garen and Ryze. I decided to learn about LoL with Garen. After making their initial decisions, Summoners are then whisked away to play on fully automated teams of bots, and from here, the tutorial really kicks off. Veteran League of Legends players will be delighted to know that the soft, slightly accented voice that announces everything in a regular game of LoL has made her return to explain the game in the Battle Training.

The second thing I immediately noticed upon entering the Battle Training was that there was an interesting new "quest" system, where objectives are represented as little quests (like "Kill a Tower") and tips appear above the minimap as giant exclamation points. What was fascinating about this new quest system, however, was the fact that there were also side-quests in the Battle Training tutorial. Upon entering the jungle, I was immediately informed of the value of 'jungling' and what enemies were where. Thereafter, I received the optional side-quest to kill the neutral camp of Wolves on my side of the forest. Killing the Wolves grants an extra little bonus of in-game gold to make the Battle Training easier, which I thought was rather neat. The "Jungle" side-quest line takes you through all of the neutral creeps and up to the Dragon.