NeoLexical

I love this. This is so wholesome <3

It this year! But it will be towards end of year, mostly because we don't want to spoil anything!

I think Skarner is still benevolent! He is good to his people, just less logical/good to intruders :) I do think the intention of the spill the beans was not to sell him as evil, but more that he is powerful and awe inspiring. While he is a wise sentient being, he does let his thoughts of a potential outcome get the better himself when driving out intruders. He will chase them down, bulldoze them and smack them with rocks.

I do think Ixtal is missing a marksman mostly because Ixtal is so magic driven. Its an opportunity space that is missing!

Arcane was written before one runeterra. Skarner old lore was as well. Every narrative choice we make has consequences and hundreds of hours poured into pros and cons of each decision. We are no longer at a point where we can wave our hands and decide because we want to make sure our Runeterra is cohesive for decades and decades. We learned alot from the past rewrites etc etc. We want to make sure moving forward, every decision matters because it will be held as universe truth.While I can't completely show everything right now, which I understand makes it a bit hard to empathize with what we are trying to accomplish, but these choices did not come easy. It took months and months of looking at options.If this comes from you loving old Skarner lore, it is completely understandable! Players hate it when we take away something that is beloved (I myself still really love the old Trundle lore tbh). We did have to weigh our options here. While its not ideal for you, we did pretty deep res...

While its true we can try to continue the story afterwards... it would be a bit odd for Arcane to not touch on it at all if we are a shared universe. This gives both team creative freedom and space to do their best work instead of putting all of the energy into how to twist a story to fit Skarner's background.

The other problem is that Skarner's lore is already in the space where he isn't given agency. His past story left him collecting the rocks of his brackern. Fairly siloed.. off on his own.

His new background puts him at the center of political struggle of a region.

This. And stay tuned for S2 :O!

You are correct in some regards. It was a couple of things. When we looked into it, what we didn't like about Skarner's lore is that he didn't really control his future and outcome. This really made him someone who was suffering an outcome rather than a main character with compelling goals that can be expanded upon, loved and empathized with. We don't want players to just feel sorry for the sad scorpion. But instead to understand his goals, his ideal outcomes and knows he has the power to potentially influence the political systems of a region. We also didn't want to completely take away the sense of loss of his beloved bond, so we thought the Ixtal people and the history he had seen can be part of that forlornness. His decisions has impact on the world versus being a victim. He is now in a position to decide, if he wants Ixtal to go down one path vs another. This also help build out Ixtal and the differing view points of some of the key players in that region. Previously, it was ...

I think our art lead said yesterday that she gets hungry looking at Skarner claws and the team really liked the idea of going to a crab boil place to celebrate his release.....
Are you spying on us?

Hey Hey! We are having a look at Guardian of the Sands recall atm. We will try our best here!

No surprise champions! We are decreasing our roadmap size so we staff up Modes team etc. But I do want to make sure each champion gets their time and space to shine :D Sometimes that means revealing too much at the start would make things not as exciting!

I will see how much I can talk about in the next roadmap/ if there will be a roadmap because this year I think lots of champions will benefit from element of surprise haha.
Let me cook.

While I agree that its better to get inspirations first before embarking on the rework...if we leave it up to designers we might never get reworks
So there is basic expectations for designers to be on a project and take it to finish line without having to come to the first meeting with a great idea. It is part of designers' jobs :D

I believe one of them was already started before poll results and the other one started after. Both took around 1 year.
Skarner actually didn't take too much more than that. However, we announced the poll before we were ready to start because Udyr was heavily delayed.
Udyr was heavily delayed because he was generally a very very resource heavy project. His various forms and ultimate skin took a long time especially during a global pandemic. TBH, during the pandemic, while I was not on champs, there were days where I was just heavily depressed and just wanted to sleep all day...

We also went through a period where we are training new designers, animators, VFX etc etc up on the team. This is good for overall health of League. It was how we are able to staff up modes. However, first projects are always a painful one for team to figure out how to work together.

Being honest, Udyr was not easy because of the bulk and Skarner started turbulent. We did not reall...

I will probably not be talking about the Arcane VGU till it releases! While I love sharing more with players, this is one of those that I think the fun is in the theorycrafting, guesses and surprise!

My fav is battlecast still :)

wow owo

What is the difference of that to making a new champ (less baggage, less skins to update etc etc). All of the problems of the old champ will still be there (worse looking in the game, tech etc etc.)
You are also signing up for making double of all skins coming out.

TBH its like whack a mole(different discipline at different time)...because of several factors:
1) Different teams are working on different things so at different moments one discipline might be more available than another. Ex: When Arena first launched we were operating with very little VFX support because it was all hands on deck to help out with all of the different augments.
2) We can't exactly lock people to the team XD Ex: After covid while everyone re-assessed their lives bunch of folks decided to leave Riot, try new teams or even stay but switch up what they are doing. Ex: We had to re-staff up animation.
3) Quality bar, things like Splash Art ... we are looking for unicorns in the industry. Taking them from other teams is just moving the problem around.
4) Training, to restart a discipline we have to get existing folks to train up new ones. There will always be onboarding time no matter how good the person is at their role. That require time from the ve...

I have thought about this before. I think it will not win out skins in terms earnings and I might be burned at stake for trying it XD considering players don't like it when you take something they are used to having ( free access to game content) and lock it up behind a pay wall.

Agreed! I think the long term success and perception of League is the one I center around when I make my case of getting more champion updates! It's a bit hard to quantify and usually not as compelling compared to: Here are the 100 fires that needs to fought today.
But I'm glad that the team members that do work on these updates are very well protected from the noise and are focused on the updates!

We are trying to! Which is why we invested into investigations like outsourcing and porting etc. These things do take time though.

There are lots of asks and human feelings when players ask for more modes, better cinematics, more skins etc. I'm not in a place to say yours is more or less important. I can only look at the raw engagement data as a source of "how many" are asking for it.
The way I see it, the amount of players actively choosing to play with the content are the ones we can bias towards or it would become a game of following the loudest voice.

The reason I explain these things are not to say they are not important, but more so bring the realities of there are many many important things that needs to be done and we only have so much time.

On a personal level, I'm glad that Riot isn't an org that works Devs to the bone and pay us next to nothing. It makes the whole industry more sustainable and make game development a good place that...