Road to Pre-Season: Replays on the Horizon

That time we said we weren’t doing Replays…

The last time we talked about Replays was about a year ago in our first Riot Pls. At that time, a number of factors led us to deprioritize Replays. Since then, we’ve put a ton of love into League’s global infrastructure (for example creating Riot Direct), prompting us to revisit the conversation. At that point, we realized it was finally the right time for us to explore the feature.

We had everything we needed to build Replays except support for backpatching—which lets you watch replays from previous patches. So we asked ourselves: is backpatching so important we can’t ship Replays without it? We knew players wanted to relive specific moments from a match, no matter how much time had passed, and realized we could reach other solutions to that problem than backpatching.

That brings us to where we are today. We are ready to announce that Replays are coming to the League client update this pre-season.

Here’s how it works:

• Download your replay from the End of Game Screen or Match History.
• Watch Replays from the current patch using our new Replay Mode, with the functionality you’re used to from Spectator Mode.
• Find cool moments using the new Annotated Timeline, which marks major events like kills, takedowns of towers and inhibitors, and dragon/baron kills.
• Capture video clips of your in-game moments (“Highlights”) using built-in recording functionality.
• These Highlights will be stored on your hard drive (C:\MyDocuments\LeagueofLegends\Highlights) as a .webm video file. These files can be viewed by opening them in any browser that supports HTML5, and shared to social media alongside your cat gifs.

With all of those pieces put together, you’ll be able to quickly capture, save, and share your favorite moments on video to share whenever you want.

This is our first iteration and we’re excited to keep working on the feature. Stay tuned in the coming months for more details!