You can now play League of Legends with a steering wheel

League of Legends patch 26.9 will herald the arrival of WASD controls in ranked, bringing a whole new way to experience Riot Games’ hit MOBA. Players have already been using third-party software to map their controllers to the game, but one genial content creator has taken the new feature to a whole new level by getting a steering wheel working – and it doesn’t look half bad.

When Lauren told me about the feat this morning, I knew there could only be a handful of League of Legends creators capable of cooking up something like this. My mind firstly went to Albert ‘Boxbox’ Zheng, but when I pulled up the clip for myself, I chuckled – of course it’s ‘Dumbs.’ The prolific Lillia cosplayer is there, sitting in his racing rig, shades on, ready to give a masterclass in Sonic Racing, aka, wheeling around as Rammus.

“You might be thinking ‘why are you doing this?” Dumbs says. “I dunno, I just thought it would be funny to race in League of Legends.” He notes that getting everything up and running took “12 hours of troubleshooting,” and from the brief gameplay clip shown, it looks to have been totally worth the toil. Here we see Dumbs zooming around with a surprising level of smoothness. As his racing wheel doesn’t offer a full 360-degree spin, he’s had to map a button to path backwards, but who cares about kiting anyway?

This lowkey cursed creation opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I can imagine Nunu savant Charlie ‘Kesha’ Eriksson hopping on the tech, while I’d love to see the LCS bring back its Sion Speedway segment just to see how pros adapt to this way of Tokyo Drifting around Summoner’s Rift. By extension, it’d be awesome to see LoL’s racing enthusiasts start up their own F1-style league.

Dumbs wasn’t quite the first to try playing LoL with a racing wheel. Back in 2017, YouTuber ‘Maxim’ posted his attempt to get one working. Without WASD, however, he wasn’t able to move Rammus through steering. Despite the technical limitations of the day, it was still a cracking attempt, so kudos to the OG. Now, with WASD and LoL patch 26.9 arriving on Wednesday, April 29, however, the brakes on creative controller inputs are well and truly off.