League of Legends is an old game. It boasts over 10 years of history and countless changes have elevated the quality of visuals and gameplay for millions of players worldwide, helping Riot Games develop features it had previously only imagined implementing.
With tech updates to the game, Riot successfully created champions like Sylas, Renata Glasc, and Viego, the 2018 Worlds skins for Invictus Gaming, and map changes like the ones coming in 2024. Yet there are still some things League devs can only imagine adding to the game.
“We have an arsenal of abilities we’d really like to bring to League,” said Lexi Gao, champions product lead in an interview with Dot Esports, “that is if we were to have better AI tech in League.” She explained that the bots Riot has in League at the moment are “not very smart,” and just walk around specific patterns and hit enemy units. But if Riot were to have smarter bots, Gao’s team would be able to use them in various ways that already excite her.
Despite sharing the challenges of fulfilling the complex desires of the champions’ team with the current tools Riot has now, Gao doesn’t feel like technology is holding them back. “We do go and create new tech when we need to,” explained Gao, “it’s just about time scope and when is the right value and amount for the value.” She used Sylas and Viego as examples of how developing new tools creates added value for the team in the long term. Working on Sylas’ ultimate ability enabled League devs to later create Viego’s passive, which was the starting point for the Ultimate Spellbook game mode.
Sylas’ Hijack allows him to steal and utilize the ultimate abilities of his opponents and served as a source of inspiration for Viego’s passive, Sovereign’s Domination. That ability lets the Ruined King temporarily assume control of his defeated foes, inheriting their powers while still retaining access to his own ultimate ability. The conceptual evolution then continued with the game mode Ultimate Spellbook, whose unique trait is that it enables players to select from a pool of four random ultimate abilities to replace one of their champion’s standard skills.
“We always start with asking designers ‘what’s the craziest you can go?’” Gao said. Then the team works with engineers, artists, and tech specialists who would often tell the champions’ team what they want “is not possible, but maybe it is possible.”
Gao told Dot that a great example of this can be found in Nilah. Originally, the champions’ team wanted to create a champion that had a whip as a weapon, but the fluidity of the movement needed to have recognizable gameplay with a similar weapon that simply didn’t exist in League. “Even some of our characters’ hair [doesn’t] look that natural in game because we’re an old piece of tech,” said Gao, emphasizing how much of a challenge creating Nilah’s whip was, her Rumi.
And while most of the time engineers and tech specialists can come up with new tools for League devs to work with, there are also moments where some champions were “canceled” because, at the time just didn’t work. However, sometimes Riot does bring back old concepts because its technology has improved and can now fully support the champions’ team fantasy.
“A lot of things can happen [when working on a new champion]” commented Gao. “We can decide not to go forward, move forward with the tech, we can decide to put enough time so that we can make the technology or settle it down for a later time.” And to the many fans who believe Riot doesn’t have many more creative ways to bring new champions to life, Gao replies that there are a lot of ideas that it has not yet explored, but if it were to, Riot could “probably make champions for the next 30, 40, 50 years.”
Similarly, Gao shared that her team is now working on a champion who will be released later next year, but was first in the works in 2019. “[The champion] was first originally being worked on during Sylas, and eventually the team took a pivot and made Sylas instead. Now she’s back.”
A more recent release that pushed Riot towards the next tech breakthrough is Naafiri. The Hound of a Hundred Bites and her puppies used to feel “very fake, not real like a live being” before behaving like a true pack, and that change is thanks to the AI tools developed to input distinct and unique movement in each unit. “Imagine if you’re just ADC trying to walk through a pack of dogs and they’re all blocking you in different ways. It would’ve been really, really bad,” concluded Gao.
With every champion Riot introduces in League there is a new tech investment that will enable the team to do more in the future, which opens a whole new universe of characters and abilities that fans can only imagine now.
Disclaimer: Riot PR paid for travel to Seoul and provided accommodation.
