@Riot : What stories do we want you to tell?

Hey guys. On the french forum, we are concerned aswell about the rebooting of the lore. Here's a translation of my post on french forums, please, excuse me for the several errors. I render thanks to Riot Lignarius (the french Community manager) for the translation.

"Hi,

I would like to step in as a player who closely follows game lore to give my answer to the question asked at the end of the DevBlog article : "What stories do you want us to tell? What parts of Runeterra would you like to see?". I know that this dialogue will be complicated since I'm posting on the French forum but unfortunately I do not have the language skills to properly convey my reasoning.

First of all let's go back to the beginning and before answering this question let my try to establish where players stand with regards to lore. What do we criticize about Riot's handling of the lore ? It seems that lore is Riot's bane in some ways, even more so than Sion's rework. You can clearly see it, even though you can tell they're having a hard time owing up to it. Let me make something clear, I admire Riot for everything else : a company that makes an amazing game with an economic model that profits both parties and that communicates quite a lot on their US boards is a rare thing.

Riot wasn't off to a bad start with regards to lore : we had a well constructed foundation and even this early we had enough elements to create some sort of role play. After that lore expanded thanks to some really cool features like the Journal of Justice and the new champion Judgments. Then these two disappeared and ever since we're having a hard time seeing where Riot wants to go, the only recent elements bringing a true and regular update to the lore being the new champions' personal bios. But now, we can't even rely on that because Riot changed their way of narrating these personal stories since Vel'Koz. Granted they're more original and better written but their contribution to the story as a whole are minimal, if not non-existent (the exception being Vel'Koz who had a new form of narration that really revealed some part of the lore, Braum and Gnar only bringing a couple of nice stories that don't add much on the larger scale of things). Riot's answer is that they've been multiplying reveals and cinematics recently.

When we look at the Twist of Fate or New Dawn cinematics, the Pentakill songs, the Trial of the Poros and First contact videos, the paintings telling Gnar's story and some of the skins in game I'm sorry to say that they don't bring anything to what I call the "macro-story" because they are in fact "micro-stories", very little pieces of the story. They are disjointed little pieces of a very vast universe that don't tell us anything, it's just smoke and mirrors. That's where the Journal of Justice had its purpose, to keep the story evolving and living. I don't see why a cinematic would have a more justified existence to tell the larger story in the long term.

Enough with the past and let's take a look at where we're at today in terms of the "macro-narration" of the game's story : today we have the big events like the Shadow Isles, Freljord or the upcoming Shurima one. But their major flaw (other than being more than a year apart from each other) is that with them they bring lore reworks where a lore evolution could have made more sense (like when Udyr was moved from Ionia to Freljord) and this makes it even harder to understand the lore.

When we look at Nasus' current rework on the PBE (changing his lore from "came from another world" to "coming from a fallen and forgotten civilization") it's almost trivial, doesn't change the story much but it's a good lore rework. All it does is help the player better understand it by grouping several events around one location rather than many. On the other hand Trundle is probably the best example of a failed rework. Looking over the fact that his new story is less interesting than the old one, his rework seemed useless as an evolution was easy to imagine. Instead of brutally going from "sacrificing himself to receive the curse of his tribe" to "troll that tricked his way into becoming the king of trolls", it would have been possible to create a transition. We know he was cast out by his own, we can easily imagine that we would have found refuge up north in Freljord and met his new "ally" Lissandra that trapped the curse in true ice. He would have then been taken in by the troll tribe and then trick his way into becoming king. The point being, with the forces present in the Freljord region, it would have been easy to justify this thematic change without this brutal rework.

Another problem is that every new champion brings a new thread of story that we know Riot will not have an outcome for which overall makes the lore superficial. Since the end of the Journal of Justice, the lore doesn't evolve, it only gets more complex by going into new directions without end. Here's a list of elements that were brought into the lore that have yet to see an outcome :

• Reginald Ashram's disappearance (tied to Kayle and Jax)
• Disappearance of General Du Couteau (tied to Katarina, Talon, Garen, Swain, LeBlanc, Cassiopeia and probably many other members of the Demacian and Noxian factions)
• Kassadin's daughter being taken away by Malzahar mentioned in an Journal of Justice article
• The criminal only known as "C" that Caitlyn is looking for
• The Darkin race
• The Watchers in the Freljord wars AND the Freljord wars themselves
• Zelos, Irelia's brother and high ranking member of Ionia
• Lilith in Ryze's judgment
• Shadow Isles events

Now let's come to the question "What stories do you want us to tell?". Personally, I feel that you have an obligation to your community to give answers to those events that you introduced to those that have been following the lore all these years. Why create a new narrative arc if the existing one is unfinished ? A good start would be to bring light on those events that seem very important to the story of the League itself since you brought them in before the game came out during beta : Reginald Ashram disappearing and the whole mystery surrounding his relationship to Jax and the disappearance of the General Du Couteau.

Thanks !"