Why so many humanoid champions?

Scrutape·1/31/2020, 9:16:01 PM·2 votes·1,665 views

I love this game, but it dawned on me how stale some of the champion design has become. Looking at the roster, out of the 148 champions, a HUGE number of them are some variation on a bipedal humanoid. Here's the list of champs that don't fit that: Hecarim, Aurelion Sol, Skarner, Urgot (debatable, still a human basically), Yuumi, Rek Sai, Nocturne, Nami (debatable, still half human), Kog Maw, Fiddlesticks (after his rework), Anivia. Vel'Koz, Cho'Goth (Kinda, still bipedal)

That's 13 champions, and 2 of them are debatable. Out of 148!

I'm just bringing this up in the hopes that we see more diverse, unique designs from the champion creation team. Fiddlestick is a decent move in the right direction, but I think now's the time to push the design envelope and explore new creature designs for champions. Keep up the good work still!

4 Comments

Pyrosan1/31/2020, 9:18:30 PM3 votes

They've ran survey's before and found by play rate and general opinion people like good looking characters which makes sense

Elite4Runner1/31/2020, 9:32:01 PM1 votes

There are psychological and marketing issues here. As a game with little-to-no story line, the design team needs to make a character's personality show as much as possible through their model, animations, and dialogue. Part of this consideration is how easily people relate to the character as an intelligent emotional being. In truth, humans aren't very good at considering things that don't look "humanoid" as being intelligent.

Perfect example, Rek'Sai, ..... You'd be surprised how many people forget that SHE is a female champion because she's little more than a monster. She isn't humanoid, she has no dialogue, and she has pretty much no animations that give any sense of personality. As far as character design goes, she's a total failure. The fact that she is a playable character that is even somewhat competitive is really the only thing she has going for her.

Obviously there are non-humanoid champions that don't fall so flat. Most of the Void champions have personalities, but most of that comes purely from dialogue. Fortunately, monsters can talk.

So it's not impossible that Riot make more non-humanoid champions in the future, but this is honestly the reason they are prone to avoid it.

Scrutape1/31/2020, 10:03:43 PM1 votes

I'm sure marketing plays into it, but I don't think that personality or good design has to be exclusive to humanoid-style champs. I'm sure it's easier, but given the sheer disparity I mentioned, I think it's due time to get a bit more eclectic. Especially when players interested in more traditional hero styles have SOOOO many options to pick from. If anything they're missing out on player markets interested in more bizarre designs, even if that market is proportionally smaller, it still deserves some love.

Also, I think the popularity of Hecarim shows it isn't impossible to stray from the norm and still make a popular champion. Granted he's basically a centaur, but it's still different from the norm.

Vanic9982/1/2020, 6:32:01 AM1 votes

A lot of champions are humanoid because they need to resemble anime to appease the weebs. It's the same reason why the same few anime girls keep getting skins; to give weebs something to jerk off to.