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Design Philosophy Discussion - Riot wants us to fill in the gaps, I want a story

Darrosh Jewfist·5/22/2015, 4:14:30 AM·14 votes·1,376 views

The release of the Ekko comic made me realize something - we've completely misunderstood Riot's overall philosophy when it comes to narrative.

For a while I've considered Riot's current philosophy to be that of spectacle creep - which is just to make the fanciest stuff possible to get a rise out of people. Fun, pretty to look at and over all forgettable. The idea is like, 'oh, they like videos? well let's make videos!', or 'oh people want comics? let's make comics!'

I think I misunderstood them to an extent.

After seeing the Ekko comic and reading some of the red post responses, I believe Riot's philosophy is that they want to go the path of early Games Workshop with their Warhammer Franchise: that is, Riot wants to create a setting and have people build around that setting with their own individualized headcanon.

Now, this idea works GREAT for Warhammer - the idea of a grim, dark future setting appealed primarily to teenage boys who wanted to make their own Spice Mereene Chaptas. People can do whatever they wanted and there wasn't a solid yes/no answer to anything - and that was completely fine, because players were allowed to make their own answer to that question. Do the Iron Hands have a successor chapter? They do now! What about the II and XI legions? Mysterious chapter created by random fan #3434 appears!

But this whole, 'let's have a bunch of mystery!' doesn't work for 3 primary reasons:

(1) There's no goddamn foundation - with Warhammer, there's entire cultures sculpted and built and a very well detailed, if checkered, history backing the conflicts, characters, and factions. All these so-called mysteries (Vi-Jinx sisters, Yasuo-Riven rivalry) are just teases limited to basically... well champion easter egg teasers. They rarely span outside of the champion's voice dialogue. It's not a repeated history hinted out through artworks, novels, interviews, or games... just literally two lines of dialogue. That's it. Riot hangs it's hat on the door and walks out for the weekend saying "have fun theorycrafting!"

Theory crafting with** what**? A single line of dialogue?

(2) Kiddies want dazzle, veterans want depth - for this, I ask people to bear with the Evangelion analogy I'm going to make. Back in the 90s, Evangelion sent shockwaves with its provocative and before unprecedented use of Judeo-Christian imagery and deconstruction of pretty much was mecha prior to Evangelion. Evangelion actually tackled themes even today a lot of shows are too afraid to handle or Evangelion simply does better. This is old Riot. Old Riot had a story (the Journal of Justice). It took a typical archetype Fantasy setting and said "Hey, let's see what it's like if there was a sort of Fantasy United Nations!" And they went with it. This old Riot actually tried to pursue storylines and build an actual world. Champions had motivations beyond vengeance, they had interactions with other champs (friggin' Janna had boyfriends and nudes - SHE'S NOT PURE, GENTS).

And I saw that was GOOD (at least better than what we have now).

Current Riot. Current Riot is the Rebuild of Evangelion.

Rebuild is flashy. Current Riot is flashy. Rebuilds sacrifices depth for nostalgia. Current Riot wants to remind you "champ X is cool/sexy/awesome" instead of "damn, this champion is weird yo." The grimdark creep that struck a lot of champion reworks (Sion's example being the prime example, although I really liked the Sion rework). There's that feel of EDGINESS and SUPER-SERIOUS COOL pervading recent champs - most of these new champs have no or at best superficial relationships with others. To see a good example of old Riot relationships, look at Garen-Katarina. It's a great example - the JoJ shows their constant interaction and the shiptease - current Narrative, take notes - slow burn like that is how you build up a mystery). And the reworked Garen joke lines to Kat only make that shiptease stronger. Without the previous JoJ, the Garen-Kat ship would have felt forced and contrived like Jarvan-Shyv (filthy, simply filthy. Half-Dragons and Demacian Princes should always be segregated).

(3) Riot never !@#$ing follows up any of its goddamn storylines.

Freljord? Three years. Shurima? Two years. Shadow Isles? Three years. Now it's looking like Zaun, Piltover's time for a rehash.

Riot just has a terrible track record of FOLLOWING UP WITH ANYTHING.

They have an army of artists willing to bring to life any world they choose to bring. Imagery isn't the problem. The goddamn short stories for Elise and Azir are basically all 'setting-the-scene' stories anyways.

the problem is: there's no goddamn story. Just a bunch of act 1 exposition. There's never a chapter 1.

This is what drives me nuts about the current Narrative is that they act like a bunch of amateur-ish fantasy writers who say 'I've got this great story for a war between three princesses and they divide into warring factions!', writes one goddamn block of text - publishes - and then decides 'mehhh... I'm bored... ohhh Shurima! I'd love a champ that loves Shurima as much as I do!"

Riot execs approve as they count their ill-gotten skin and LCS money.

In conclusion, this is why Ekko's lore baffles me. Riot Narrative isn't at all trying to tell a story - it's trying to dazzle and distract and market. I understand Riot's a business and they want to make money - but holy crap you guys were sitting one of the most original game IPs to the easily biggest game on the planet and _you keep dropping the ball. _

So please.

Tell a story. Not pull an Ekko and keep repeating the same goddamn mistakes.

tl:dr - Riot Narrative is like a fanfiction.net author who releases a fantasy chapter 1 and says 'next chapter will be posted soon! tehehe, read & review!' and date published reads: May 2012.

20 Comments

Pheonixwish5/22/2015, 12:55:12 PM5 votes

Aight, first off, Ekko hasn't been released yet, and even though his lore seems "finished", there's no guarantee that this is all we're getting. Additionally, Riot has hinted at making longer loves available elsewhere, like Azir's short story. They aren't planning on leaving that completely behind, these cinematic and graphics will just be added bonuses.

I personally believe that the lore will continue, in time, and they expect us, as the community, to speculate what the holes in the cinematic and stories mean. We still don't get where Kalista's from. That doesn't draw us away from the lore, it gives us an air of mystery instead of absolutes. We wonder about the Ruined King, we wonder about Ekko's relationship with Jinx and Vi, we even freaking wonder about Rammus at this point. That doesn't mean it's finished. It's only just begun.

Sneak Dog5/22/2015, 8:28:22 AM3 votes

Freljord? Three years. Shurima? Two years. Shadow Isles? Three years. Now it's looking like Zaun, Piltover's time for a rehash.

You should check this. It's been two years and some weeks since the Freljord patch. Perhaps you're consistently one year off?

Orangesilk5/22/2015, 2:26:10 PM3 votes

"The mysteries that surround Rammus are numerous. How did a simple creature of the desert suddenly become able to reason? How did he craft his vaunted suit of armor? What is he searching for as he crosses the Shuriman desert? One thing is for certain: trying to stop the inexorable Rammus is a fool's mission."

You get to fill in the gaps in the story yourself.

Hrrm... he could be a voidling for all I know and care.

KING OF MASKS5/22/2015, 5:22:47 PM3 votes

Good thread, fun read, but Jesus Christ do I hate Evangelion (if you'll pardon the pun).

Anyways, the lack of foundation is definitely the single most crippling thing the lore is experiencing right now.

NorthernDruid5/25/2015, 1:35:42 PM3 votes

The biggest conclusion I got from the debacle after the retcon, is that narrative has forgotten that they're writing for a game. Not a book, movie, video, comic book or a freakin' audioplay.

They're supposed to be telling the story of the game League of Legends.

And then they decided to not do that and tell stories about the same characters who are Champions in the game, just without any of the actual connections to the game they're telling the story for.

When I read the JoJ I feel like this was part of the same world as the game I play, like these are the same characters.

When I watched Bard's flashy video I later felt like the Bard in the game was nothing at all like the Bard in the video.

Simply because the Bard in game is a being mindlinked to me as we work together with the rest of my team, while the Bard in the video was just there doing random things unrelated to the rest of the scene. Bard's ingame motivations I can understand, while Bard's motivations in his out-of-game story are intentionally left vague to add mystery to his character in Riot's non-game Alternate Universe Runeterra.

Also, please specify 40k, Warhammer 40k refers to the futuristic space sci-fi setting, whereas at least as far as I'm aware, just plain Warhammer refers to the fantasy setting some 40 thousand years earlier in the storyline (if the settings are actually connected like that, I never got that far into it to actually know <.<).

Just nitpicking.