Arena, Lee Sin & PvE Mode First-Look | Dev Update - League of Legends

Malphite - wasn't intended to be public. That's a work in progress project looking that's exploring a different approach to visual updates to see how the work required versus results achieved compares to our more common ASUs and VSUs. Kinda like how with Jax we tried rolling out a full update in a series of pieces rather than all at once. No conclusions yet, I expect we'll talk about it at some point though

Card board counter part - that is the card board version with a bit of generative AI applied

While the release timing's pretty close the two modes were developed completely separately, with the people pitching each mode not to the best of my knowledge actually aware of the other project at the start even. While they're both PVE against a fair number of enemies they play pretty differently.

"garliclike"

TIL a new term

Oh, sorry, that was meant to be Seraphine, Brightmoon and I just got them confused

(I kid, I kid...)

We're trying it out. Want to see what people think of this approach, whether it encourages or discourages people from playing, whether it impacts champ pick rates etc if they know in advance versus a it being a surprise towards the end of the split.

The pony tail's a meaningful part of base Lee Sin's silhouette. We want to make sure we're reflecting it in his skins more, especially those that have had clarity issues where it hasn't been immediately clear which champ you're looking at (Storm Dragon being the prime example of that)

"Noisy" visuals usually tend to look and feel better for a particular skin or champion in isolation if they're high quality. If everything gets pushed to be noisy like that though you unfortunately just end up with a game where nothing's readable/everything's drowned out and you can't pick out key info well enough

SAVAGE

Thank you for the kind words! I am feeling very sentimental/emotional about this being my last dev update but I am very excited to take a nice vacation :)

It won't be themed around base Runeterra lore

Org structure shouldn't have much, if any, impact on how aligned art and narrative are across the games. Alignment like that's discussed regardless of where a game happens to live in our internal processes. The call that we discussed late last year to have everything be part of one shared Runeterra going forwards is the sort of thing that results in greater alignment on upcoming content, won't always mean we go back and retroactively change existing things necessarily though

Totally understand, hope a bit of context helps a little at least!

Nothing currently ready to share to the best of my knowledge, will check with the team for potential inclusion in the next one though

It is. If you go to the Profile area in game and click Ranked you can see the remaining time in the split there too (currently says 36d, 14h, 36m for me for example)

That's being worked on at the moment actually. Recent discussion with Rioters who play Lee Sin has included things like Flash and E interactions, which spells can be cast/started during others etc. Our starting point is that we want to make sure that anything that has become expected and currently supported gameplay gets preserved, even if not intended when Lee was first designed. There'll be a bit of bug fixing too though of course on some weird and definitely not intended interactions. Hopefully we'll get the distinction between the two right in each case, do give us feedback as soon as he hits PBE though on what feels correct and what feels off

Preparation's still underway for its rollout. We didn't have anything new to say this video, so didn't want to just rehash old news. Timeline has slipped from what we'd originally predicted, we're very much in the headspace of doing it well is much more important than doing it fast though for this

No plans to do so. It's something we talked about a lot when initially mapping out the sub classes then deciding whether or not to make them public or just use them internally. Our conclusion was that for the more engaged players who want to dig into the details a lot it made sense to talk about the sub classes. For the more casual player though we felt the clarity of "Fighter, Mage, Assassin etc" was more useful than more detailed breakdown would be when it came to helping set initial expectations for a character. There are definitely some cases, juggernauts especially, where that doesn't hold up so well, it was a deliberate trade off though for what it's worth

If I had the faintest idea what else to do with my hands I'd do it. My on camera options however seem to be "wooden", "flailing arms wildly" or "wooden and flailing arms wildly", so I'm working with what I've got

For a mode to become permanent it needs to show sustained player engagement. Arena's first two runs had a lot of play early, then fell off a lot. Making it permanent with that diminishing engagement profile would lead to increasingly poor matchmaking (both time to get a match and skill discrepancies), which pushes players away and further exacerbates the issue. While some players would stick with it regardless you end up with a pretty small population making it hard to justify meaningful ongoing development for the mode, which makes things worse again.

We do think Arena's got a lot of potential though, hence the ongoing updates to it. Our goal is to try and give it the variety and appeal that it needs to be a long lasting mode. IF we can demonstrate that, we can then look at having it be permanent.

They'll get updated, not certain on exact timing

You know what, let's buff Maokai for old times' sake

That is a risk yeah. Arena matchmaking's really healthy early in a run, so if things like 16 players lead to a meaningfully better experience, and therefore more sustained engagement, that's worth the cost. It's certainly conceivable though that we could be wrong and it might turn out to not be worth the trade off. If so we'll have to adjust again for the future

any warwick enjoyers

:smilerss:

Love me some garlic