With Arcane season two just around the corner, Riot Games is fully immersing its games in as much of the Arcane universe as it can. And that all starts with Ambessa, League of Legends’ newest champion.
Arcane fans should already be familiar with Ambessa Medarda from season one of the show, and they’ll be delighted to find the devs at Riot have captured her character in League as a top-lane one-vs-one specialist who thrives in the hands of cunning and tactical players who like to isolate their fights. Gifted with a barrage of dashes through her Drakhound’s Step passive, Ambessa strikes and repositions quickly after casting her abilities, and her ultimate, the ominously-named Public Execution, allows the Noxian warrior to be exactly as brutal as she needs to be.
“We wanted her combat to feel very visceral,” game designer Max Perlman told media members at an Arcane-themed preview event, highlighting how Ambessa’s buffered dashes from her passives quickly formed the backbone of her design. “We wanted her combat to feel intentional, proactive.”
With so many dashes to keep track of and each only occurring thanks to a movement or attack input from the player entered during one of her abilities, Ambessa isn’t for the faint of heart or the weak of APM. Perlman noted she’s not a champion for beginners, even though some players can pick her up and be “functional” with her kit. Perlman also highlighted how Ambessa brings relatively little to teamfights compared to other champs and that all of those dashes—a word many League players read with outright concern—come at the cost of not having a stun ability, and is a champ “forced to build aggressively rather than build healthy.” Accordingly, Ambessa players will have to wisely pick and choose their fights.
While that might not make her the strongest top-lane pick in all situations, it does feel like it captures the character setup in Arcane season one incredibly well. And, as Ambessa is the first character made originally for Arcane to become a full-fledged League champ, the storytelling accomplished within her gameplay is impressive.
Ambessa isn’t alone in bringing Arcane to League, however. ARAM gets in on the action with the limited-time Bridge of Progress, a new map for the mode that gives players a fully decked-out Arcane experience.
When playing ARAM on the Bridge of Progress, players will start in either Piltover or Zaun on either end of the bridge. Both sides come with their own bits of environmental storytelling: different announcers for one side or the other, unique shopkeepers to buy items from, and even some hextech and chemtech flourishes in design for the different turrets and Nexus points.
Of course, that’s not the only thing changing with this ARAM LTM. Modes product lead Eduardo Cortejoso was sure to point out the addition of new side lanes to the media, which the team added to offer more play area and to give more options to characters with different playstyles that aren’t usually suited to the one-lane gameplay ARAM offers.
“I tend to prefer engagers and fighters myself, so having a new angle in which I can kinda ‘gank’
the enemy team is a really refreshing experience that doesnʼt really change ARAM
too much,” Cortejoso said. The sidelanes certainly color the ARAM experience and give the Bridge of Progress just an extra bit of depth to its gameplay, but the Arcane storytelling also extends to this gameplay. Players in the mode have a chance to be assigned to a character present in Arcane—and if that character’s designated Nemesis appears on the opposite team, they can participate in Nemesis Quests for some extra goodies in addition to storytelling flavor.
Some of these Nemesis pairings, such as Jinx and Caitlyn, make all sorts of sense for Arcane fans. Others might be a bit of foreshadowing for what’s to come in season two, like Jayce and Viktor—although those two have a long-standing rivalry in non-Arcane League lore, too.
Regardless of whether you want to take your League battles to the Summoner’s Rift or the Bridge of Progress, there’s plenty of Arcane story to discover when Patch 14.22 drops tomorrow.
