Game and story are now so split that Riot would need a NEW backstory for the actual GAME
The full magnitude of the insanity of Riot's lore retcon just hit me: Riot's driven such a divide between League of Legends and its "associated" lore that we're back at square one, in need of some kind of backstory that explains what we're looking at.
The most basic step in making a story for a video game is answering the question: "so wait, who am I, and what's going on here?" That can be trivial, like in Street Fighter II ("this is a big tournament to decide who's the most awesomest fighter in the land"), or really elaborate and essential, like Mass Effect. In any event, the primary purpose of a game backstory is not to be a fantasy novel series, but to add flavor to the game itself.
The old lore handled the pretty well: "you're a Summoner. These are Champions. They're fighting to win glory and power for themselves and their factions, on a magical arena. Your job is to help them with your magic and otherwise back them up. They're talking to you through a psychic link." It was a little slapdash, but it filled that primary role.
Well, we've lost that.
Story and gameplay are now completely separate. There is simply no way to make sense of the actual game League of Legends except, perhaps, as some kind of Smash Bros. "this is what it might be like if" daydream. The best I can do, while coloring within the lines drawn by this narrative team, would be something like, "well, sometimes Champions fight each other, so, this is just them fighting each other … on an arena … where they respawn … and they call you Summoner … even though you've actually been deleted from LoL … so … "
Riot is doing this because, it says, it wants to run off and write a bunch of lore that has nothing more in common with the game than the fact that it uses some of the same characters and settings, minus Summoners, minus the League, and minus the Fields of Justice.
But they've gone so far that, now, we basically need a new backstory for the actual game. We'll get a minigame like Ascension here and there, and we'll get some gorgeous, extremely expensive artwork showing Ashe fighting Sejuani or something, but in the meantime, we're worse off in terms of actually supporting and adding flavor to the game than we were when Riot Games was a handful of people hanging out and turning their DotA hack into a standalone game. We can make fun of some of their ridiculous lore ideas, but you know what? It was flavorful, it was interesting, and its handwavey style fit the broad-strokes, even cartoony aesthetic that makes LoL distinctive. And it accomplished the primary purpose of game backstory: to support the game. Not to be a new Game of Thrones-esque fantasy universe, not to create a bunch of trashy paperback novels, not even to make room for ambitious artists to draw Ashe and Sej punching each other in the face off in some mirror universe where there's no actual League of Legends. To add flavor and meaning to the game.
A Rioter recently remarked about how the term "Summoner" would eventually need to be excised from all the Champions' voicework, and laughed at how much of a pain that was going to be logistically. I don't think she actually paused to consider, further, the awkwardness of all these Champions just babbling to themselves (?) or threatening themselves with eternal torment (?) or cheerfully complimenting themselves (?) on their latest tactical maneuver.
You know what would be less awkward? Taking five minutes from coordinating your media extravaganza and artistic self-aggrandizement to provide some kind of rudimentary story for the game. Until then, you've actually done worse than a handful of dudes sitting around going, "oh hey, what if it's like, some kind of magic battle arena and they fight matches instead of war because of mutually assured destruction?" and "yeah, whatever, now how do we make right-click work again? I think I broke the UI."
