League of Legends Dev Tracker

I'll take 1 and 3!

1 - When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time with one of those make-your-own-games programs. At the time I foolishly tried to do it all - design the characters, write the story, create the battle system, and make the music. I'd already been dabbling with MIDI in trying to piece together arrangements for a three-piece punk band I was in, but I pretty quickly discovered that making the music was by far my favorite part of trying to design the game, so I just kept at it and tried seeing where it could take me.

3 - I think when you're starting out, it's actually a pretty great learning experience to simply try to emulate other songs and artists - I find that can be one of the fastest ways of learning how and why they made something work, from the inside out rather than just passively listening. Once you do this for a bit and start getting a firmer understanding of some music theory and production fundamentals, I think that's when it's a great...

Besides Ludwig's theme, my serious answer would be the Cleric Beast/Vicar Amelia theme. I have a sneaking suspicion that the key of the song harmonizes with the pitch of the screams of those bosses, because it just sounds so musical when you hear them howl. Great fight.

My sh*tpost answer would be the Tower Knight theme from Demon's Souls. The first time I heard it, I was like "what the f*ck?" and it's been an earworm ever since.

Question to the folks here - what would you like to see from Riot Games Music in the future? Could be bands, genres, merch, experiences, whatever - let us know what's on your mind!

1 2 3 :p

Listen, we're only able to do these crazy little music projects because there are people out there willing to experience them. Never in a million years would I have thought that I'd be able to do anything remotely close to what we're doing as a team now, so thank you and everyone who's a fan of Riot Games Music for tuning in.

Favs:

- Villain, bar none. I'm both an Eve AND Kim Petras stan, so when everything fell in place for that track it was already over for me.

- Die For You has been on rotation lately. Love it.

It feels like validation that we're doing things right. Something we've always tried to stick to is the idea that we're not just making music that's "good for a video game company" - hopefully, people see what we're doing as good music, period.

If we do our job, Riot Games Music projects feel like cool music experiences that anyone can enjoy. But of course, if you know our games and IP, you might like them even more ;)

K/DA will always be up there for me. It was not only my first time developing a music project at Riot, but also an opportunity to work with Fortiche (now, of Arcane fame) on the POP/STARS music video. A lot of my personal passion as a kpop fan went into the band and it also introduced me to all the extremely talented and wonderful people you see posting on this thread, so I'll always have a personal connection with it.

As far as something challenging I've learned, probably how to work with a huge company made up of many moving parts to pull off big experiences like we do every year. Big cross-product campaigns like Spirit Blossom, Worlds, K/DA ALL OUT, and Pentakill take an incredible amount of coordination and communication to pull off - and while it always isn't easy, it's always worth it when players come away with good and lasting memories of the things we've done.

See you in the Lands Between

I know it sounds trite, but Riot really does care about doing things with a player-first mentality - and the stuff that we've been able to do for music really embodies that.

One crucial truth about music that we've always tried to stick to is the idea that everyone has a deeply personal and specific relationship with it, which you can't really fake. So we always try to approach it from a place of authenticity (ie, "Would I, or someone into this kind of music, listen to that?"), while still tying it to a great experience that only Riot could provide. I don't think things like K/DA would have happened had we done it, genuinely, any other way.

Okay, don't hate me but I probably play Sol the most. I just find his oppressive strike-throw mix so satisfying and fun, and the fact that vortex low profiles a lot of stuff is just the cherry on top. Daisuke's vision, too strong.

I'm not a musician (creative director) - but what I love about Ludwig's theme is that there's a duality to it that reflects who he is as a person, and the boss fight you find yourself in. The first half of it is loose, manic, and formless - mirroring the feral, bestial nature that overcame his mind. But once he rediscovers his "guiding moonlight", it completely changes. His theme takes on a very composed, waltz-like structure that gives you a glimmer of the humanity that he once had. It literally feels like a mad dance of two hunters in one last showdown.

Yes, absolutely. I'm one of those players.

Depending on when you bought the pass, your Milestone Mission progress may have been reset due to a bug. We'll be compensating players for that lost progress with something soon. I was affected by it too and it felt pretty bad.

We were trying to solve the feeling of a 40 minute loss giving you an unsatisfying amount of progress - the previous system rewarded quick stomps and punished longer matches, which is something we thought was not respectful of your time. The overall tuning should be nearly identical to the previous setup, and so far, the data suggest that the vast majority of players are progressing at about the same pace or just slightly over / under.

A quick note about lack of overspill - this existed in the old system, and also exists here. It's a sh*tty limitation of our mission system, and it's something we are going to address in the future. I can't give you an ETA because it's the final week of the year for Riot, but this is something we absolutely want to fix because it sucks.

It has been somewhat masked in the past by the fact that objectives weren't always consistent mission to mission (e.g. Mission 1 could be earn gold and Mission 2 could be vision score) so overspill di...

Gosh, I like a lot of random things. I'm going through Bloodborne again in advance of Elden Ring (tfw no CNT). Just beat Ludwig.

Besides Souls games, I'm a big fighting game fan. Play a ton of 3S, and some Strive now and then. Love JRPGs too - Earthbound and Final Fantasy Tactics are my favs.

And obviously, music games - especially old school 90's era Bemani type stuff.

So, when we try to do this type of stuff, we see players getting really upset that they're forced to play a "role" in order to do the mission effectively. We don't want missions to warp player behavior or change the way you play to the point that you're not having fun any more, and the more granular and "interesting" we get with missions, the more they tend to feel this way.

This type of feedback is why we rely so heavily on "or" Missions. Do a thing that is a little out of the norm to complete a mission quickly, or just play the game and complete it more slowly. It's interesting, because it begs the question:

What are Missions actually for? Are they meant as just daily / weekly reward dumps that don't encourage you to do anything different? Should they be mini-challenges that break you out of your normal gameplay patterns to try something new and reward you for it? Can they be both without delivering an unsatisfying experience?

I think, in general, we lean...

I've been talking to a few folks about the Debonair pass changes, and on this note in particular since to me it has echoes of the first-week Sentinels tuning situation. The team explained that the problem is that the smaller we make the numbers for the repeatable token missions, the more points get lost to rollover.

....which itself is obviously a problem, and as easy as it seems like it should be to solve, there's no cumulative "points" tracker in the background. Changes during the mythic content overhaul will mostly address this, but that's not here yet :X

(As an aside, I do want to confirm the rollover thing is not a secret tactic intentionally built to sneakily squeeze more games from y'all--if we wanted to do that it still would've been better to implement rollover because then we'd have much finer control over how many more games you have to play. We don't get anything extra from people who land at 0 rollover loss or just a couple points' worth.)