Since it's been a while since the big retcon of LoL, tell me. Do you like the new lore direction?

I like the new lore in a vacuum. I loved Reborn, I like Azir's story, I liked the Rek'Sai diary.

I wish we still had the IoW and League to go with them, because I don't think they needed those to be removed to make sense.

Lore has a direction? I thought they were just deleting it considering every lore rework has been cut into 3 - 5 sentences.

What I liked about the old direction was that there was a sense that Valoran was a living breathing world, and this was accomplished pretty much solely through the Journal of Justice. You had characters, you had personalities, you had actual DEVELOPING storylines. Champion judgements gave insights beyond that found in the champion bios and gave a lot of the quotes more depth.

And you could expect these updates on a regular basis.

What I dislike about this new lore direction is that, for a long while now, all of the major lore updates have been tied to champion releases or holiday events and then utterly forgotten. Rather than have a new Issue of JoJ to read and enjoy every month, we're waiting until much longer for pretty much the same content.

I hate waiting.

War of Three Sisters in Freljord unresolved. Shurima event unresolved. If the world was heading towards mutually-assured destruction prior to the IoW, what is keeping Demacia and Noxus from going for the Final Rune War?

None of it is explained or touched upon again.

Really, the new lore direction was a bad move since it was done seemingly before ANY lore was made or technical issues were sorted out. This reminds me of Final Fantasy Versus XIII, now Final Fantasy XV, which was announced back in 2006 as just a trailer but only a year or two ago did full production actually swing in.

So I'd say the dev blog was pre-mature.

There's just so many issues with the retcon. It basically devastated the bulk of the lore such as IoW, Summoners, and probably de-canonized the insights we learned from champion judgements and the JoJ.

It retconned the map of Valoran of all things.

Honestly? What new direction. They still haven't finished the shurima event.

The retconn was pushed through with no actual plan other than, "The IoW makes it hard to write new champ stories that feel unique so we should axe it."

Whether that was the reasoning behind it or not, that is the appearance riot has put forth. There has been literally no followup lore to give the game purpose, none of the "lore" put forth so far has in any way been superior than the lore prior to it, each event since the retconn actually makes more sense if you assume the IoW is still functioning (Poroball-fights? Really?), and the players are completely disconnected from the world we're playing in since actual game play no longer has any meaning at all. The champions released since the retconn are the only notable difference between old lore and new (and not one of them couldn't have fit into the old lore with a little ingenuity).

Well, that and the fact that all the interesting Champions we already have are being rewritten cliff-notes style. Nothing about who they are just what they are.

Honestly, without the summoners(read as players) and the IoW(read as Lol itself) there is no reason why Thresh hasn't killed Lucian yet, or why the Freljord and Ionai aren't a Noxian provinces, or where Kayle and Morg come from (hope they aren't conveniently stuck on a new event like Nas/Renek/Cassi/Rammus were).

I despise the retcon. There are so many reasons why, I'm not sure I can even think of each of them off the top of my head. Let's see...

• It breaks virtually ALL gameplay/story integration, going against the entire point of writing lore for a game.
• It's a massive retcon. You know what League needed? Something comicbooks are constantly mocked and bashed for, that's sure to get people to take it seriously!
• Their reasons for doing it were flimsy at best, and complete bullshit at worst.
• They had nothing to back it up with. There was no replacement lore ready at all, and no lore since was remotely impossible before.

I could add more or split these into more reasons, but this'll do.

No.

Call me stubborn, but I cannot help but feel Riot took away something I really liked

It's been over a year. No I don't like the lack of Trundle.

I'm serious, they mention in the dev blog that the freljord event is part of their new lore. A year and now we have... well, this?

You should've probably put in some more answers(or phrased them differently),because while i like the new lore pieces(the diary from the guy who wanted to capture some Xer'sai,Azirs full story,Sions relaunch-lore in particular),I still dislike the retcon itself.

I hate the retcon. Was mildly interested in beyond the game, now completely disinterested beyond the game. There are two ways to support lore. The first is to have a massive lore department continually updating lore with official backed support on every single step. This is how Blizzard does it with Warcraft. The other way is to have players do it by letting their macro choices influence your lore. This is how CCP Games does it with Eve Online. Both ways require significant amounts of input from the developers otherwise people eventually stop caring.

As far as I saw, Riot has done neither or does not actually know what lore and character development is. This is ironic seeing how Ghostcrawler (I think?) was an actual Blizzard employee so the Riot LoL team should have some knowledge. Nope.

Now, this is perfectly fine if they want to lead League of Legends down the road of action game, just like how Call of Duty multiplayer works. But if that's the case, I expect Riot to go all the way instead of sitting on the fence with a half assed attempt at the RPG macro genre. If League is supposed to be a MOBA first and only, then go and delete EVERY piece of lore and be done with it. Just don't pretend that it's not and hope we'll be complacent.

But hey, Riot doesn't read Boards.

Direction? What direction?

I loved a lot of stuff with Shurima and the Sion release....but all of that stuff could've easily happened with the League still intact. I'm all for character centered lore expanding their own stories and whatnot, but the League provided a central framing device so that all the characters can interact with each other and potentially form alliances and whatnot. They can still go off and have adventures of their own of course. The League isn't there to stop them from going on and doing their own thing.

Of course they don't. Change is evil.

I like the new direction myself. After the stopping of the JoJ, there was just a several-paragraph stating "name, rank, and serial number", along with some more interesting tidbit with "and they came to the IoW and lived happily ever after." THAT was a problem. HOWEVER...

Riot retconned with too little to show. If they had waited until NOW to retcon, they would have the Shurima event, Rek'Sai's lore event, and the upcoming Amumu lore to show. However, they forgot that the second they pulled the plug that a few characters were on life support and they had no backup medication. Now we have Jax, Fiddlesticks, and others homeless and with uncertain futures. If they had at least given them ten sentances at the retcon, people wwould have been better about the whole deal.

TL:DR League needed the Retcon because of bad writing, but implemented it poorly and with too little foresight.

Let's keep this thread going.

If the community wants Riot to see their opinions on the new lore, we're gonna need a lot of participants. :D

There are tiny pieces of lore that are awesome. Most of these are the champion teasers/release content.

Xerath got ret-conned into not being a mage. No joke, go back and re-read the lore for Azir and Xerath. The only place where Xerath is called a mage is in Azir'ls lore. Xerath refers to Azir as a naive, impying Azir's assumptions of the world and himself are wrong. If he was a mage at this massive magical ritual, he'd be thinking about the magic involved, or involved directly with it. Instead, he's focused on the decept. He's a fake, a deciever, at heart. It's more likely that Xerath bought a magical trinket from a vendor to kill Azir than that he killed him with any magical skills of his own. He's "Assendent", but there's no "Magus" in his character anymore.

That said, I liked how Xerath's lore gave insight into who Xerath is. We see how he thinks, and we see the Shuriman culture was through his eyes. Out of the "lores" we've been given, it's the most engaging by a long shot, despite me not liking what they did to the character of Xerath.

The entire concept of Summoners was flawed from the getgo. The whole concept was insane... nobody of any consequence would willingly submit to that for any reason. It's better to give us a story and flatout treat the game we are playing as something the characters do in their spare time for assorted reasons; Draven would do it for fame and fortune, Katarina would do it to keep her skills sharp, so on and so forth.

I do! It came with a promise of more serialized stories, resulting in more progression of story for every single champion!

I have enjoyed what we've gotten so far but... we have gotten so little. They really need to fix the tech issue so we can get some stories!

Personally,I neither like or dislike the direction because I have no idea what direction they're taking it anyway.

Why isn't there a neutral option in your poll