[2021] My 2 cents on Viego's visual design

so heres the explanation of this. So the black mist corrupts people and makes them look altered and monstrous. Viego controls the black mist though, it doesn't control him, so he hasnt been corrupted by it at all like other SI champs

I have been very transparent about our goals when others asked. We have had the goal for the last 3-4 years of making 70% broadly appealing champs and 30% niche each year. This includes VGUs as well, so last year Volibear, Fiddle and Lillia where targeted niche and the rest to be broadly appealing. In general we would be happy to hit like 50/50, but the reality is if you have goals to have 70/30 a few are going to miss the mark, and at the end of the year we generally end up hitting about 50/50 when we try to hit the goal of 70/30. In the past when we tried to hit a more even spilt of 50/50 we ended up with something more like 30/70 with 70% being niche. What's worse is if a niche champion misses the mark they end up in a very rough spot (Taliyah/Ivern for example), whereas when a champ targeting broad appeal misses the mark they usually just end up niche (Aphelios/Qiyana, for example) The reason its important to be hitting at least 50% high engagement champs is that the primary goal for champions team is engagement, so if we are seeing like 70% of the champs released in a year with very low engagement, the team isn't really doing whats its intended to do, which is getting people to engage with new content, weather thats playing as or against a new champ. If no one is playing the new champ then no one is playing against it much either.

currently yes their are 3 niche champs planned for this year, Mundo and 2 new Champs, though niche doesnt always mean monster champ. It can be of course, but their are some broad appeal creatures spaces like Yuumi (Cats are pretty appealing) as well as niche human spaces like Swain, Brand, for example.

it always kind of fluctuates up and down but stays relatively the sameish size

yeah we targeted her as broadly appealing for a tank support, which is a pretty niche role. To early to say where she will land longterm yet. usually it takes like 2-3 months for a champs playrate to settle

Because not everyone is going to be into broadly appealing champs. It is good to hit a specific niche of players that would never be excited about most broadly appealing things. It also allows us to to make crazier kits, that we know won't be super appealing to a lot of players, but it's still cool to have them show up in games every once is awhile. It also allows us to make some champs that might be really good adds for the lore/IP even if they won't get played as much in LoL

We have examples like that in champs like Blitzcrank, who has very high gameplay scores and low theme/art scores. These champs tend to do alright still, but not as well as champs with both strong visual and gameplay scores

Maybe but Lee Sin is in like the top 10 visual and theme scores in the game

hmm at no point has Taliyah or Ivern ever been crazy popular, even when they are OP. Here is the B/D chart of both compared to like Sett and Yone.

https://imgur.com/a/vC2oQK2

As you can see even when they launched which is the smallest point on their tracks (each point represents a patch and the thicker it gets the more recent patch it is) they were niche, and much lower playrate then some popular champs when they are very underpowered. Ivern still hasn't even crossed onto the right side of the graph which is where we would say a champ is popular , which is still very far from crazy popular. My point with Aphelios is that despite having a super complex kit he is still a pretty successful niche champ with a small but dedicated playerbase If Aphelios had a less appealing visual design I think his playrate would be closer to something like a Rek'Sai or Ivern, which is to say extremely unpopular

I never said she was monstrously niche, i just said she was targeted at niche. Niche does not mean a champ is a monster, though monsters tend to be niche, in general. Lillia is cutsey because we wanted to make a creature champ, and when we looked at our roster the vast majority of creature champs where more monstrous, especially in the jungle, and we felt that a colorful cutsey creature jungler would add something a lot more unique to the overall roster then another jungle monster champ. We felt for 2020 that the Fiddlesticks VGU would resonate well with our players that like monstrous champs and we do count VGUs towards the overall years champ diversity

He is emotionally ruined when his wife was poisoned and ultimately died, which in turn caused him to trigger the ruination

We did of course, we talked about and tried many things in early ideation. For one we didn't want to overlap to much with Arthus, but more importantly when we asked ourselves what kind of person would damn the whole world in a attempt to bring his wife back to life we felt that was something a younger more vain king would do. Someone who just experienced first love, was infatuated with it, and then lost in quickly after he found it and would do anything to get it back. It just felt correct for him to be a young, handsome, hopeless romantic given that backstory. It also separated him from many others Shadow Isles champs. It also gives him a very unique space in our Shadow Isles roster. All these reasons led us to his current visual design.

hmm i think Vlas has the potential to be broadly appealing at least by battle mage standards, probably not like a lux or something but fairly broad

We were inspired by a lot of Goth Rock/Metal stars/singers for his look, since we felt Goth rock aesthetics meshed well for the whole vain, hopeless romantic angle

Not at all, we still want to VGU him someday

sure

https://imgur.com/a/objdcbe

yeah should be roughly 2 weeks-ish hopefully