Legendary skin concept: Virus Vel'Koz
For a while I've been trying to think a way of doing something, ever since it was mentioned that one of the original concepts for Vel'Koz was that he would be the only self-aware champion, realizing he was in a video game. Raid Boss Veigar kind of took a few of the ideas I had, with his recall revealing the code behind the map and so forth, but it never seemed quite right anyway. And considered a coder Ve'Koz where he's like just a nerd (relax, Riot, I don't mean you) writing the game code, but again, not quite the right fit.
And then Program Lissandra and Program Soraka come along, and look amazing.
I give you the Legendary skin: Virus Vel'Koz Rewriting/deleting/manipulating the code that surrounds him, particularly these inferior programs running around thinking they're end users.
The creepy cyber look would fit Vel'Koz amazingly, his tentacles easily being like a glowing green (purple still?) mesh, the sort over which a graphical skin would be laid, or something similar. Glowing eyes, laser effects, the way he moves, it would all fit great. His spell effects already tear holes in reality, it's easy enough to adapt that to a more cyber feel. Remember the Urf special spell effect things on death, like the doom ray from the sky? Have him do that, but with more of a 'program deleted' sort of feel when he kills someone, like when Pulsefire Ezreal dies. When he 3-hit-passives someone (if that's still a thing after his rework), make the target sort of..glitch out for a moment, the sort of thing you'd see when a hologram isn't working quite right in a movie.
But what would make it a Legendary skin, in addition to the new spell effects and recall and such, would be the reworked lines. Aside from the voice effect used for Program Lissandra, make his lines more aware of the fact that they're all in a video game...sort of. Make him a coder rather than a biologist. Comment on the programming of the opponents rather than their anatomy. It would make for some great lines triggered by things like him killing opponents. "Obsolete code incompatible with current environment. Deletion complete." Hell, give him a few lines along those..lines, there's plenty of potential there. Maybe a joke about spaghetti code, or about scripts being insufficient countermeasures. Some general taunts about inferior code or inelegant design or whatever, but also plenty of room for specific taunts (or interactions upon seeing a champion). Comment on ancient programming architecture upon seeing any of the champions who haven't gotten a visual update in forever like Taric or Mordekaiser or Morgana. Comment on the identities of champions but by the way they're coded; Zilean merits mention of incorrectly ordered lines of code; a Feasted Cho'Gath might call for an impending stack overflow warning; Tryndamere ulting brings an error: unable to kill process; it's abundantly clear that Teemo is malware; I dare Phreak to not make a Kha'Zix Bugsplat pun; Kalista is an archive of an abundance of files; Sion and Urgot are re-purposed legacy code; Soraka is antivirus software; Lissandra would results in frozen processes; Orianna...something; the list goes on and on. Can the system detect particular skins? Unique interactions with both the PROJECT skins and the Program ones would be quite appropriate. Maybe even Mecha/Battlecast. Don't make it completely ridiculous like one of the Arcade skins, more like...this cyber horror sees everyone around him as just another program. He just happens to be correct in that, but no one knows that but him and us.
It's a shame I don't have any art skill to speak of, but hopefully I'm getting the intended image across. What do you think?
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