@Riot, what kind of balance do you strive for between the Story of Runeterra and the balance of Runeterra when creating champions?
What is more important to you? Story, or Gameplay?
Or is a balance of both ideal? Does good lore go hand in hand with good gameplay?
Ideally, they represent eachother. Your gameplay is intuitive and your story meshing with the gameplay. It might seem harder in a moba, but you do control a hero on a battlefield battling with and against other heroes. I don't see why they have to be segregated.
Best stories I've played were those which blatantly prioritised story over gameplay (yet not denying the gameplay regardless) and those that embraced their mechanics and used them to tell their story, rather than denying them. League just blatantly prioritizes gameplay over story post-retcon, ignoring the gameplay entirely. I don't see this going well (combined with the disregard for characters during the retcon as well...).
Well actually there really doesn't matter as the lore has pretty much been disconnected from the gameplay so well they can pretty much have the story and gameplay however they like How much they focus on those things... well yeah that's up to riot (though from the look of things they definitely don't focus on lore... well it doesn't seem like it at least)
While a balanced approach would be ideal imo, gameplay should always come first in a game. You can forgive a shitty story if the gameplay is good, but a bad game can just prevent you from ever even getting invested in the story to begin with. Story in a game is often driven by its gameplay afterall.
Ideally, they should be the same thing.
If you have the mindset of, "I have this game, now what story am i going to tell alongside it", you're doing it wrong.
When you're making games, whether it's the gameplay or the story which is your foundation, they need to tie into each other for it to be more than a game and an accompanying story or vice versa, a story with some accompanying gameplay.
Playing a game should be synonymous with experiencing a story. No matter what the story, no matter what the game. The best games are the ones who make the story integral to the gameplay, and make the experience of the gameplay integral to the story.
It doesn't need to be anything difficult, and even those moments when suddenly every input is bound to the same action carry the experience a lot. If you make it so that one of the two overshadow the other, then you've done something wrong.
Note that not every game needs to tell a story, but the ones that do benefit more from treating gameplay and story as one intertwined entity than two seperate subjects to be managed.
It overall depends on what type of game we are dealing with. Some need more story attention than gameplay, some the balanced approach and some the gameplay. MOBAs are mostly gameplay oriented types of games, they are not there tell a narrative story when you play it, doing that would take a lot of resources and time which at this time is impossible and not advisable. This is why all MOBAs tend to lack in the story departement because it is very hard to put the story into these games and they fail in making a narrative that is continues if not planned from the start (which most MOBAs dont).
a balanced approoach is best, but if you cant achieve that gameplay prioritizes in almost every genre of game, this is because "oh look your story is amazing but your gameplay is absolute crap and no one ever wants to play again"
You have to remember that there are separate teams to work on these two things, so it doesn't matter what mix of each we want. We simply ask the team for a required amount of whatever pump out.
Edit: Nvmd I think I misread
I would really like a balance of the two. I would like champ design to create interesting character kits and such, with a goal on personality and such, while the story would be fitting in this character with x personality into a certain faction and creating a backstory to explain such.
In a game like this? Gameplay. At the end of the day, we're playing a game, not reading a novel. The best game will fall apart if the game itself isn't very good, no matter how epic its tale is.
Okay so...While I like the concepts present for stories available to riot...I wouldn't play the game if the game itself sucked.
I vote gameplau coz its what we are exposed to most
tho lore should b much more prominent
Overall when designing the skills a balanced approach is the most healthy,the lore can be an inspiration for some skills and the skills can be an inspiration for the lore.
However if there are points where these 2 clash(like in the case of aatrox,aatrox lore makes it clear that he basically lives to fight and that he throws himself into battle,so making him a fighter/leech-tank is good approach,but a support ability doesn't really fit into that gameplay-style),then I'd say that gameplay should be taken over lore.
