League of Legends: Riot could offer more gameplay updates under certain conditions

Gaming News League of Legends: Riot could offer more gameplay updates under certain conditions

More partial redesigns and scope changes? Riot responds

For ten years, League of Legends has lived to the rhythm of adding champions, competitions, balancing updates or even different events. A well-oiled production process, but which one may evolve to allow the title to stay on top. Riot Games has therefore opened the door to this many updates from past champions

Most conditions have been set. There are now 160 champions in League of Legends, and not all are played. Some no longer part of the high-level meta, others just aren’t effective enough anymore for the contest. Riot regularly steps in to balance the cast, but as we saw last time, It’s the practice that makes the metaand not necessarily the gameplay planned and thought out by Riot Games.

To encourage players to give former champions a chance, Riot has picked up pace since the beginning of Season 12, with partial redesigns and scope changes. Our colleagues from MGG took advantage of Bel’Veth’s exit to interview Ryan “Reav3” Mirelesresponsible for gameplay in MOBA, about these changes:

I don’t think we’ll see more full reworks as these go through the same development process as a new champion, so their pace will also slow down a bit to meet the same quality goals. Also, the (visual) VFX updates will not increase since they are on a different team, so they will not be affected by the tempo change. However, it is possible that this new strategy will lead us to do more MGC (complete gameplay update). Before committing, we would like to test the outcome of the launch of the very first that will impact Aurelion Sol.

The complete overhaul of the Aurelion Sol is a life-size test

In other words, Aurelion Sol acts as a test to determine whether the chosen strategy is relevant or not, and if such an operation does not harm the future of the game. If all goes well, we should be eligible more regular gameplay updates, since it’s not about character design or skins. Therefore, some champions that are considered dated in their aspects might stay as they are, but the way of playing them could evolve a lot. One thing is for sure, there will be more scope updates:

(…) This is something we can do more often now thanks to the slower release of champions. So far we have had very positive feedback from them. This is always subject to change, but I think given the current development everyone can expect to see more of these updates in the future.

In doing so, Riot will respond to a community request that is often raised on the forums that updating old champions is a good thing, and that the slowdown in new character releases isn’t that severe. If all goes according to plan, some champions should become interesting again and get picked more often. As an an example, MGG quotes le cas d’Ahriwhose performance has been reduced three times is voted three times more often than before the updates.