@Riot Narrative, Workplace Productivity In the Narrative Department. What Balance Do You Have?

Impetual··3 votes·701 views

Do people working in the narrative discipline have deadlines?

Pretty much every post I've heard lately makes it sound like you guys spend days discussing champions and factions in an endlessly progressive, yet nearly endless, adventure.

It makes it sound like you guys don't even have any deadlines to produce content.

This sounds really troubling.

It may also explain the infrequent lore content releases.

In my management experience, giving too long a deadline will allow for laziness and poor productivity, while giving too short a deadline will allow for little imagination and uninspired results. (To put things simply...perhaps too simply for a forum post, but you get the idea)

For an artistic discipline, a balance must be struck between time to deliver content effectively, and the time to develop that content properly.

There usually needs to be a deadline for content to create a sense of urgency - the sense of urgency produces efficient results - without that deadline being too restrictive as to allow an artist's imagination to flourish and create a well developed imaginative design.

From a player perspective, it sometimes feels like Rioters aren't being given strict yet practical deadlines on their projects, which may be helping to increase the slow rate that lore has been released at.

5 Comments

Nybx4life1 votes

Depends on the projects. While I do agree it seems that their deadlines are crazy long for no reason (I assume the amount of time Blizzard has to make an expansion pack is the deadlines Riot has to make lore), I feel they're also being very reserved because of the backlash of retcon content.

It's obvious that gameplay is prioritized far more, so that's why modes like Urf can be released timely and there's more community involvement in things like Champion Masteries and champ skins (DJ Sona, Omega Team Teemo)

Impetual1 votes

Well, we'd know more about that kind of stuff if they talked to us about it like they used to.

In terms of Lore, Riot's leaving us in a state where all we can do is hope for the best, but assume the worst.

It's been awhile, but I miss the times when the team responsible for Lore would actually talk to players about it.

R.I.P. Riot Season 1

Nybx4life1 votes

I thought they were cool at Season 2 as well.

KING OF MASKS1 votes

Frankly (and keep in mind this is just speculation on my part), since the retcon all the recent "lore" releases seem to have had more input from other departments, particularly sound/music and animation. Shurima, Bard's release, Amumu's curse, etc.

No idea whether or not that's true; I have no way of looking up the amount of effort certain departments/people put into such releases. But I think it's fairly certain that compared to straight-up lore text, we've had far more animated shorts or music videos and stuff like that. Right now I'm not at liberty to do the research and quantify anything, but that's my hypothesis.

Impetual2 votes

To be fair, we have had much more inconclusive lore media that doesn't really tell us anything concrete about Runeterra than we used to.

That's sort of a plus, I guess...Assuming Riot wants Runeterra to be a world that is up to interpretation, rather than a concrete factual one that has a real story.

God, I hope Runeterra still exists with a concrete lore with an actual story.

I'd hate to see it stripped down to being a bunch of champion bio's that mostly don't even tie in to one another.

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