“Sweet, that sounds great - but how much in a MOBA is the bones you want to build that experience on?” “I think one of the reasons the idea is popular, and I share this feeling, is the idea of ‘I want to play my favorite champion in a PvE thing,” he says. Limited-time PvE events, like Star Guardian: Invasion or Odyssey: Extraction, struggle with player retention, according to Van Roon. While other games change and evolve, introducing new modes or transforming their core concept, League is still played on a very similar map, and some of the game’s earliest champions still exist in mostly the same form. With a roster so large, it’s impossible to give everyone some love, but regular patches and multiple teams keep League afloat. In the meantime, League releases smaller, mid-scope updates to help old champions keep up. But we’re always going to miss for some particular players,” says Van Roon. “I think we’ve gotten better with our updates of preserving the core of what a player was there for in the first place. The other thing we see is an attitude of ‘I want more updates - except for my champions, go do something to the champions I don’t like and don’t touch my stuff.’”Ĭhange is hard, and sometimes an update - even if it brings an old, dusty champion back into the mainstream - can scare away its old mains. Meeting the needs of those different players is a balancing act. “We also see some groups of players and regions who have hunger for new stuff. “We have some groups of players who don’t want new stuff, they like the current state of the game, or they don’t enjoy new champions and want the older ones updated,” he says. While it can be frustrating to watch older characters, like Rammus, languish with their old models and animations while newer, shinier champions like Nilah rock up, Van Roon says there’s a balance to strike when it comes to revisiting old, beloved champions. Champion updates are handled across three teams: There’s one group for Summoner’s Rift that handles the major patches and pre-season adjustments one group of champion designers that overhauls old champions and recreates them from the ground up and one group on the Skins team that does art and sustainability updates to bring older, janky characters like Ahri and Caitlyn into the modern era. While champions generally get freshened up with new models for Wild Rift, League of Legends on PC is where fans see major overhauls to champions like Udyr, Volibear, or Fiddlesticks. League has a roster of over 160 champions there are nearly 80 ported to Wild Rift. “We’re not always going to get things right the first time - but we’ve got a bunch of chances to get it right, and a willingness to keep stepping into problems until we find out what the good stuff does look like.” He notes that the smaller patches also allow the developers to shift project timelines around with relative flexibility. “I found out fairly recently that before League launched, one of the requirements that Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck had was that they were willing to sacrifice quite a lot of other functionality to get the ability to patch every two weeks,” says Van Roon in a call with Polygon. This cadence is popular with fans Van Roon says it’s critical to both League’s success and to avoiding a culture of continual crunch. League of Legends has a two-week patch cycle there’s consistently something coming out, even if it’s just balance adjustments or smaller changes. Polygon spoke with Van Roon about how League will grow in the coming years. Riot is faced with the daunting task of keeping things fresh, all while working on a title that has accrued a decade of various visual and technical debts. Van Roon will oversee production of League of Legends, its mobile port Wild Rift, and the auto-chess spinoff Teamfight Tactics.Īs of 2022, the League franchise has dozens of characters spread across its mainline titles, each of whom has their own needs in terms of both technical maintenance and new content. On Wednesday, Riot announced that Andrei Van Roon, a veteran of the studio who has designed champions like Ziggs and Lissandra, would be taking on the role of head of League Studio. League of Legends itself is 10 years old, and despite these new additions, it has remained, at its core, League - a competitive 5v5 game that takes place across a map with three lanes and a jungle full of dangerous monsters. The League of Legends franchise has inexorably expanded over the past few years, growing from just being a MOBA to having a multiverse full of colorful takes on familiar characters - there’s a stand-alone RPG, a mobile port, a critically acclaimed animated show on Netflix, and a forthcoming novel.
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