Story

I love stories. Love 'em to death. Curiosity and fascination abound when I venture upon a new tale and I find myself wanting to read more.

Well, usually.

Like any picture or any song there are good and bad stories, and being the creator of my own fair share of lousy tales - and a few ones that I'd be proud enough to say, "Yeah, I wrote that" - I know the feeling when a story turns out lousy.

Anybody reading this is going to start linking this to the recent "Ekko" comic, and you'd be in the ballpark. Certainly my curiosity back into the lore section was sparked once again by the release of this comic. But what really made me want to make a discussion like this was visiting another thread.

For any who are curious, the thread was "Void Culture", here's the link - some people had some good types on there, I liked it a bit, give it a look: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/story-art/KRvxa2UA-void-culture

Admittedly, one of the primary things enticing me to the thread was that a Rioter had commented on it and I was curious what to say. So I scrolled down to check what was said and I noticed what I had been hearing from the Rioters elsewhere: the central question or focus was always on how something feels. What does the void feel like to you; what Ekko felt like as a champion; what a story felt like, what a backstory felt. Feel, feel, feel.

Which is a good thing. Feelings are the baseline of a story and are the very thing you expound off of in order to make an engaging world. If your story has no feeling, it has no heart, and as would tell you the heart is the strongest muscle and really the only thing capable of making something feel truly alive. But that can't be all you have to a story. After all, you can't live without a brain and the logic therein. You need bones and muscles for structure, your digestive tract to ensure you have nutrients to live, you need the respiratory system to even be able to keep alive lest the oxygen kill your brain. And this is what League's story is lacking - it has nothing but a faintly beating heart.

You've asked us how we feel about things in the story - honestly, I can say there are certainly champs I enjoy character-wise. They feel nice. But that's it. There's an initial intrigue before further inspection reveals basically nothing. And there's a problem with the story that it sends mixed feelings - not in an intriguing way, but in a distracting way. Dark and gritty world, a boy is shot - clearly I would feel rather upset at this. But this is stifled by the overarching feeling of utter confusion at it all - there is no real why, there's no real how, there's no real what and very little who and where. You asked how we felt: for me, and I would wager for countless others, confused about sums up the main feeling overall.

And that's what will happen when it's nothing but feeling - because feeling is not inherently logical. Feelings will only be logical to those who relate directly and can justify them. If we do not relate, then there's only the question of "Why?" And again, that is all we have to show of the lore right now - feelings, intrigue, layer upon layer of air over a suspended beating heart and my first question is always going to be, "Why is there just a heart here and how is it beating?"

This is all wrapped in an extended - if not admittedly cliché and lazy - metaphor, so here's the plain and simple for everybody that doesn't want to read through the flowery and fluttery language:

Riot, your story has no substance. The end of the Sopranos was a cut to black and an eternal question of what happened next. To this day, people were upset, but damn it it was intriguing and the series is still a great one. Breaking Bad is filled with characters that we don't know their whole story and frankly we couldn't care less because they're still compelling all the same with how the story is told. And while those are TV shows, Mass Effect has proven that games can have a far more compelling story, and the Elder Scrolls has shown us again and again that even if the story is a rather cliché or overused trope, people can still have a thrill just exploring the world before them.

But the thing is they need a bloody world, and they need to have some kind of a position to take the point of view of in that world. Since the destruction of the lore, we don't have a clue anymore, and debateably even with the old lore there wasn't a great amount of cohesion or sense of reality.

If you want people to stop harassing you about the story right now, you need to give them some solid ground. You have a vast amount of intrigues and plotlines - but that makes up a story about as much as a thesis statement makes an essay. You've told us what you're going to talk about - now back up the statement.

A fellow story-viewer has posted a topic on this as well; he's a bit more straightforward and blunt than I am here, so give him a check: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/story-art/ERzPvOcm-design-philosophy-discussion-riot-wants-us-to-fill-in-the-gaps-i-want-a-story