Hello everyone! I want to answer some questions and reflect about the champion team. I’ve been with the team for around a year now, it’s been a blast working with people that are so very talented and passionate about the game and community.
When I first arrived at the team, we were suffering from lots of the downstream effects of Covid. Zeri, Renata and Udyr were all pushed further out to accommodate the various disciplines that had folks down from being sick, having to take time to work on life changes or moving away from the team. I think many of us took the time stuck home as an opportunity to re-examine our lives. Some of us found new adventures within Riot (Me included! I moved from LoR back to LoL) and others have started on new journeys elsewhere. Afterall, many folks on League have been here for quite some time.
With all of the shifts and changes, it became painfully apparent that as a team we are reacting to changes rather than planning for them. Many folks on the team have worked almost a whole decade here and to me that is a red flag (not that they don’t love league anymore, but everyone can use some change once in a while). We are looking for the best talent in the industry to do something super specialized. Tons of knowledge is passed down through doing and whenever we lose someone, they are very painful to replace..a lot of times at the cost of our releases.
Knowing that, we needed to slow down a bit and regroup in order to set up a better and more productive future. Many of our disciplines needs rebuilding and some of our most senior folks are probably the easiest to tap into for bold new ideas (game modes!). However, they are the ones that are also the most needed for teaching and coaching. Many of them went above and beyond to help lift up a new generation of Devs on the team (We have 5 new design members and that’s just 1 discipline!). So the good news is that there are many many new faces and talents on the team who can’t wait to see what you all think of some of our upcoming releases!
The bad news is that we definitely recognize the time we’ve been keeping you all waiting. We cannot build champions or updates while there are missing disciplines. We need engineers, designers, artists, narrative, VO team, etc etc to complete projects. If there is one discipline down, then that’s our bottleneck. We’ve been very focused on getting things out to players as much as we can that knowledge transfer has been taking a backseat. We finally see the light at the end of the tunnel as our team is more solidified and everyone has been properly onboarded.
What does that mean for champion updates?
Champion updates (VUs, VGUs, VgU) are generally more complex than making a new champion. Not only does the old champions have a multitude of relationships to re-examine, our IP now touches so much more than League of Legends. Updates are a way for us to re-establish world building around them and also have a deeper look at what worked and what didn’t (Cough Seraphine Cough). There are a lot of grounds that need to be established first before we can set out to update the visuals. This knowledge oriented work is not something that is easily solved with more people. It takes time to refine and iterate. However, production pipelines are something that we can accelerate. My hope is that as we work on the production muscles, we can build out more ground work for champs so that they are ready to go into production. There are no promises yet, but we are working on more updates!
But where’s Skarner? It’s been a year!
Due to the large scope of Udyr, VGUs have been pushed back. Udyr released back in August and that’s when started to work on Skarner. Unfortunately, when the polls ended last year was during a time when we were very short on several disciplines(new designers onboarding, animation team was rebuilding, audio and narrative was stretched thin). Skarner is quite a complex champion to update due to just how many champions hextech and the brackern touches (Camile, Seraphine). Moreover, there was just so much that wasn’t working for Skarner. He is the bottom of thematic enjoyment out of all champions, thus it is time to do something completely different so we can uplift Skarner to the arthropod that someone can love. We have seen many ideas, kits and narrative proposals and we believe we have landed on one that is exciting! It will still take some time for us to flesh out the newest direction and take Skarner to completion. I will not spoil too much now, since we will be keeping everyone up to date on a dev blog, but Skarner will be in a different region than he was previously. Also remember, that Lol Pls was filmed in early November :P Since then there have been movement on parts of Skarner (Kit direction!) but unfortunately we also lost our Narrative SME. Our Narrative lead is now onboarded and coming to the rescue to help untangle multitude of webs that makes our current crystal scorpion and our future brand new (and improved imo) Skarner!
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