Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

The Separate Disscussion

Mirage Night·5/17/2015, 2:52:23 AM·57 votes·34,615 views

A quote from Riot Shadow

[{quoted}](name=Riot ShadowStorm,realm=NA,application-id=6kFXY1kR,discussion-id=Ql5gi7Ah,comment-id=0000000600040000,timestamp=2015-05-17T02:24:38.177+0000)

Right, I should clarify - I'm only trying to point out the fact that those pieces exist. Whether they're good enough is a separate discussion entirely. It just feels really premature to me to say that Ekko's lore is lacking, and to get really angry about it, when we haven't even released him yet.

Ok, here is that separate discussion. Those pieces that exsist are far from good enough in my opionion.

Sneak Dog pointed it out pretty clearly

[{quoted}](name=Sneak Dog,realm=EUW,application-id=6kFXY1kR,discussion-id=Ql5gi7Ah,comment-id=000000060004,timestamp=2015-05-17T00:52:41.203+0000)

The Shurima event storyline was boring and had a very boring medium. Arisen was great but not really officially released, just put on the forums. Kalistas invocation/pledge told nothing more than the short summary. Scourge of the Desert was about Shurima and Noxus. Mountain wasn't much really, given that we have no context to put it in. The feats of Braum is a nice piece of character building.

I'm not blaming people for assuming this is basically all the lore we're gonna get for Ekko, only Azir and Sion really had more lore than their short bio. Perhaps we'll get it twice or thrice like with Kalista.

(Well, there's also Xeraths modus operandi and main motivation getting changed when Azirs story got released, which isn't helping things much from my perspective. On top of that, the first post-retcon event, Freljord, being all build-up and no conclusion where Trundle got removed and replaced.)

I'm pessimistic about Riots lore and I do believe I have solid reasoning. I'm not going to be excited about upcoming lore. You'll probably just tell us the same shallow character, and (more importantly for me personally) perhaps taking another old champion and changing/replacing it to fit in the new characters lore.

Regardless of it all, it's fair to wait for his official release before judging once again.

259 Comments

RiotRiot ShadowStorm5/17/2015, 4:34:54 AM40 votes

Cool, I'm happy to kick this off. First, here are the stories I was referencing in that post:

Azir : Arisen | Shurima Event Storyline Kalista : Invocation | The Pledge RekSai : Scourge of the Desert Bard : Mountain

Specifically, these champions did NOT get long in-client bios, but had these stories released alongside the champion's official release (which I'm defining as when we activated them on Live servers). I'll refer to these as launch stories.

To give an idea of how I personally think about these: I consider Mountain to be a story about Bard, presented in video form. It tells a story about how he interacts with the world. How successful it is as a launch story is the "separate conversation" I'm hoping to have here. Mirage Night, TerraRising, Sneak Dog, and others have all claimed that these launch stories are not good enough. I want to better understand why you all feel that way.

I'm going to assume that short in-client bios are here to stay; but I agree that we need to do a better job making all pieces of a Champion's lore available in one place. For the sake of argument, let's say we put a link in the client for each champion, that brings up ALL of their lore (and heck, links to related champions' lore as well) in one page.

(DISCLAIMER: I don't know what our plans are around in-client lore. I'm just using the above as an example to frame discussion around the stories themselves)

So, with that assumption made, here are some things I'm curious about:

  • What parts did you like about the launch stories? What parts didn't work for you?
  • Does the medium matter to you? Are there different mediums that we should explore?
  • What do you think the goal of launch stories should be? How do you define a successful launch story?
  • How much does world-building matter to you in regards to launch stories? Specifically thinking Rek'Sai here, or even Sion's Reborn piece which focused a lot more on the world around the Champion.
  • Is there other information we should share about champions at launch, in addition to the launch stories?

Feel free to answer some, all, or even give other thoughts not covered here. I'm heading out for a while; I'll jump back in either later tonight, or sometime tomorrow. But don't wait on me... respond to each other, try to elaborate, clarify, or even challenge (nicely!) each others' views.

And lastly, quick reminder that everything I say here is my own opinion as a player, I can't promise anything... the usual caveats.