http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/creative-spotlight/dev-blog-exploring-runeterra if you don't check the front page by chance.
At least they're straight-up telling us, that's a good start. I'm sad, honestly, I don't agree with the decision, but it's done. The game itself, the League is not actually part of the story at all. The characters are who they are, and we just get to play a game with them in it.
Hm... kinda makes this Super Smash as a MOBA...
It seems like Riot is saying: "We don't want to make a story that fits the game. We want to write a fantasy universe off to the side here. That game you're playing? It's a meaningless mashup of what it might be like if for some reason these characters started fighting each other."
I don't understand this decision at all. The great strength of the League of Legends as a lore concept is that it quite conveniently explains where we the players fit in, and where our matches fit in. Before you say, "Oh, you're Champions now, instead of Summoners" — that's not really true, is it? It's more like, at best, "you're now Champions fighting non-canonical brawls in some kind of arena for some reason." It's more like we're playing daydream fantasies of Champions, doing things entirely divorced from what they might actually be doing.
I really don't get why they felt they had to erase the League to write their "exciting new stories". By its very nature, it's accommodating of all kinds of plots.
Want to have a war? Sure. The League's job is to prevent the planet from blowing up, not ensuring world peace. So the war happens, with the League simply setting boundaries on how far the conflict can escalate, and eventually declaring a winner.
Maybe they're expecting to write the next Game of Thrones. With all due respect, I don't think they're going to pull that off. It's a shame that their pursuit of this objective leads them to treat the actual game League of Legends as a secondary concern.
Same here, I dislike to see all the great plot-points and characters just thrown out of the window with all the old lore. They had a pretty good story going on but they just gave up on it instead of improving it. I can understand it though, they want more accessible, evolving and global lore and not all champions allowed for that. Some others did but not with tying in directly to their background, it'd be their chapter 2.
Especially scared since they used the Freljord event as an example of new lore, an event that brought me nothing but disappointment. First they hype up an event in which nothing happens, then at the same time they also retcon Trundle and fail to maintain his character but make him a generic bully. This retcon really made me lose hope for the new lore team.
Sometimes, however, we look back at decisions that made perfect sense when we originally made them, but are now at odds with our design values and ultimately limit our ability to continually improve League of Legends. That’s unacceptable, and in such situations we seek to aggressively reimagine content in a way that realizes its full potential.
This would be the best way to give me hope for the lore department. I've seen rioters admit Trundle went wrong. He didn't go wrong because he became an ice troll or got sized up a bit (trolls are large), he went wrong because he wasn't Trundle anymore. Do his voice-over over, adjust his lore, give old Trundle back and I'll be happy. But I've seen zero indication that they'll put in this amount of effort in a single unpopular champion that they just needed to give Lissandra some depth and this saddens me.
If they were gonna hit the "restart" button on lore and knew that from the point in time that they were doing the Freljord changes (seems like they did), they should've said something then. Ya know. A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR AGO.
Honestly, they went from decent lore with characters I was attached to into something that may or may not be better, but with the ghostly apparitions of characters that I once knew.
I couldn't care less about the new lore. If they are restarting it now, they could restart it again in another year because reasons. :\
