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So have we forgiven the lore team?

Shield Villain·8/1/2015, 7:03:01 AM·51 votes·17,533 views

This Bilgewater event was awesome, but, I personally haven't forgiven the lore team for Shurima yet, nor will I any time soon. They essentially butchered the lore of a handful of champions for a half baked idea, then decided to go back and retcon summoners before they had even fixed their first mistake, destroying yet more lore in the process, and making the quotes, lore, and identity of champions become nothing but jibber jabber.

Sona still calls me summoner, so does Cho'gath. But apperantly I don't exist anymore. Lee Sin's entire identity revolves around Summoners, and he still has that lore up. But it's not even cannon anymore. So what gives?

Again, the event was good, but who are we trying to kid? A week and a half for months worth of constant bull shit isn't fixing anything. It's a step in the right direction, but god knows how many times the lore team has done that and immediately dove right back into the shit and muk we cried out against

Lore team, I still think you're dead. If this is all your months of "planning" has bore, then I don't want anymore events. I just want my favorite champions to have some lore that is actually relevant to their identities. As far as I'm conerned, the Lore Team hasn't been doing their job for a long time now, and this event is nothing more than a meager attempt to make it seem like they are doing what they're being paid to do.

You know, we joked for a time about how Lee Sin was never going to be nerfed, but despite that he got the worst nerf of them all. His Identity was removed from him. Riot, plx, reconsider your way of doing things. How is Lee Sin going to make anymore LCS BIG PLAYS without his lore?

126 Comments

Chromatic Eagle8/1/2015, 11:22:30 AM25 votes

It's a step in the right direction. Not perfect, but a start. First they need to clean up what was -promised- to us, Shurima and the Shadow Isles. Then you have new champions with barely any story. After that, they can start rebuilding.

NorthernDruid8/1/2015, 10:31:02 AM22 votes

Even with the bligewater story event, they still haven't given us a basic introduction to the new setting, explaining all the things they claimed they were gonna retcon almost a year ago.

Y'know, all those core setting details they conveniently claimed flasehoods about to justify telling a completely different story instead of making lore for their game.

Don't forgive them for throwing away the setting based on factual errors about their own lore just because the new unrelated stuff they're doing is high production value.

They still don't have a setting, because they haven't detailed the new core elements to replace the old ones which held it together.

They haven't actually retconned anything at a large scale. They just claim to have done so and people go along with them, allowing them to get away with claiming flasehoods of their own lore and not follow up on their claims.

If they've retconned the Summoners, The IoW, the game itself, and the non-lore setting doesn't include those, then what does it include? What about the world? How was a new rune war prevented? or wasn't it, and why hasn't that blown the setting up yet?

Claiming that "everything's the same except the setting details we can't be bothered to get a basic grasp of" isn't retconning. You have to actually say what's happened instead of a (in theory atleast) neutral institution being set up to police MMD (Magic of Mass Destruction) usage, and provide an alternative conflict resolution method to potentially world-ending wars.

Just saying everything's different now isn't enough. You've gotta say how everything's different.

So far all they've done is expand on the old lore, remove a lot of stuff, and rework some of the more out there champions.

But they haven't actually gone contrary to their setting.

They just stopped referencing it.

So I atleast don't forgve them for not giving us closure.

(I also don't forgive them from doing the stupid "retcon" thing in the first place, because League's Lore is what i've been wanting out of a game the last 6-ish years, but that's just me. I also feel they really ought to give Factions a community spotlight.)

We should definatively not forgive them for not knowing their own lore, and basing major shifts in the direction of storytelling on easily recognized factual errors about their own story (AKA. Either they lied us straight in the face or they're utterly incompetent at their job).

Nilok8/1/2015, 11:36:33 AM14 votes

An interesting note is that the lore team has shifted a bit. When Shurima was released, the old Narrative Lead was leaving and sent the whole thing into quite a bit of confusion.

With this, we have a new Narrative Lead, Graham McNeill, who worked on Warhammer 40k around 4th edition, and has been a novelist for the franchise until 2014.

I found the story so far more interesting then the Shruima event, and it explained more of the world around the characters as they interacted with it. I can promise you, it was not an accident that TF ended up running around Bilgewater like he did, it was a way for the writer to show the interesting features of the city by pulling them into the story and being experienced the characters. Gangplank's scrimshaw piece also seemed right at home in a scene from 40k, which hints to me that Graham may be very involved with the stories.

So far, this event has rekindled some hope for me in the story for League of Legends. Is it perfect? no, but it is a strong start for the team, and one I hope one they will have a strong follow up on.

RiotRiotJaredan8/2/2015, 2:50:25 AM14 votes

We've got a lot left to do, I've stated that on numerous occasions, and Burning Tides wasn't ever meant to be the panacea for all the issues we are striving to tackle. What I hope it does is give an idea of the quality bar we are trying to lay down.

We have a lot of things to do, including rewrites and expansions of old bios and current character introductions, but we feel like we are on the right path, particularly as the response to the kind of template for the new introductions has been received so positively. We still have layout stuff to sort out, but the style of content seems to be resonating and we think it's a good start.

But that's all we consider it to be. We want to get many more stories to you, combined with a stronger basis and understanding of our Champions and the world they inhabit. Burning Tides has just made us more determined to do that.

OmegaTree1198/1/2015, 8:12:43 AM13 votes

Short answer: No

The Whamboozler8/1/2015, 7:15:51 AM11 votes

It's a step in the right direction. Granted, it will take many, many more steps to get me to enjoy the new lore as much as I enjoyed being a summoner aiding my champion in their battles in the fields of justice... but at least they're TRYING. I'm sure they'll fumble it sooner or later.... but they're TRYING.

Xonra8/1/2015, 7:09:58 AM10 votes

The Bildgewater event as a whole was decent, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it was awesome.

The writing was a bit...awkward.

Just like how my writing is in this post (intentionally), since I make a space and new paragraph for every sentence I write.

For some reason they also talk really awkwardly with interactions between the characters that made it hard for me to take it seriously.

If the same person who wrote this lore writes all of it going forward I might have to rip my hair out, because as someone who has written (I'm not going to brag nor am I bragging about past exploits to say I would do better), this was a really awkward writing style that made it very hard to get into the story.

GreenLore8/1/2015, 11:31:16 AM10 votes

They still need to clean up a lot of stuff. Some champs don't have their full lores like Skarner Nasus Mordekaiser Some champs don't even have a place in runeterra for now,like Kayle Malphite Chogath Some lore pieces are still hard to find,like Xerath , Kalista Azir

And they still haven't added links in the inclient lores to the larger lore pieces.

The event was definetly a huge step into the right direction,but there is still more to do.

Celio Hogane HD8/1/2015, 4:55:31 PM9 votes

I will not forgive them untill they start doing lore outside events.

Or more than one event a year.

TerraRising8/2/2015, 9:44:49 AM9 votes

It's been said many times before, but as one of of Narrative's biggest critics, I'm going to add my two cents (and I fully expect to get my change once I'm done).

"Forgiveness" implies that there are no further problems and that every thing is "hunky dory" between fans and Narrative. This is simply not the case. There are years worth of grievances left unaddressed and this current batch of lore, while a step in the right direction, is but a drop in the bucket to address them all.

There are 126 champions currently in League of Legends, each with a need for a unique, long format background story (or lore). Currently, we have four of these expanded stories, all of whom were directly tied to Bilgewater mega event and delivered after years of pain and agony from the fans (starting with the Karma rework and end of the Journals of Justice in 2012).

Narrative had promised that these stories would not necessarily need to be tied directly to a Freljord/Shurima event, a promise that has not yet been fufilled. The team is also finalizing the format and future bios could use a very different format than the beyond adequate one seen already.

Burning Tides has been awesome, so far... but what happens at the end? Are we going to get the same sort of B.S. cliffhanger ending we got during Freljord and Shurima? Are we going to get some resolution to this conflict or will the story simply be left unfinished to never be touched again while Narrative just pats themselves on the back and moves on to the next project?
I do like that this tale has been told mostly through text, with a skin tie-in as well, but was this by design after years of lore fans demanding more words or was it because Riot's working on the new annual cinematic and all the animators at Riot are too busy on that project to help with this one?
There is a huge inconsistency within the department on how they handle these bios already. When Ekko was released, the team said that they didn't believe that it was necessary to have champions closely tied to other champs in their bios (Ekko x Vi or Jinx). Yet, Miss Fortune's new bio has her entire story built around gaining revenge against Gangplank for her family's massacre (which conflicts with her in-game voice over but that's more on ChampUp being cheap and lazy than on Narrative). Heaven help Riot when a new Narrative Lead comes in and wants MF to be more "wench" than "warrior."
This lore team clearly does "grim-dark" really well, as seen through their changes with Miss Fortune's story. But... can they do whimsical? Can they do heroic? Can they do horrific? Can they do noble? Can they do any of the other emotions that these champions engender besides "grim-dark?" We'll have to wait and see, won't we?
We don't know what our collective reaction will be when Narrative botches one of these new format bios (and odds are they will). We also don't know what Jaredan and the rest of Narrative will do in response. Are they really willing to go back to the drawing board and fix what they got wrong? Are they going to pull the "we think we're right and we need to move on to other stories, so your thoughts don't matter anymore" card some at ChampUp have been using? We just don't know, do we?

So, no, Narrative are taking some positive steps in their handling of this story, but we're not at the point of "forgiveness." They have a long way to go and I think they know it. It's up to them to continue their path.