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Riot, Could You Explain Your New Lore Direction In Detail?

Impetual·12/2/2014, 10:18:02 AM·3 votes·649 views

Riot, it's starting to seem pretty clear that we are never going to have anything like early LoL lore again. That really sucks. It feels bad. I miss the JoJ, and the IoW, and it feels pretty terrible that those cool ideas would be abandoned in this manner. It really sucks, but I guess us fans are at your mercy.

RIot, you don't really seem to care about your lore anymore, as you seem willing to rewrite it as is convenient. The emphasis no longer seems on creating an all encompassing narrative that ties each and every champion together, but rather favors random champions that don't have anything to do with more than 2% of the champion pool fighting it out cuz of reason ala super smash bros.

So much wasted potential. (potential that was previously realized and then forgotten about.)

Riot please. For once have your narrative department actually talk to us, or if it doesn't exit, let us know!

It's about time, as we've only received tiny bits of lore here and there ever since the JoJ was killed.

What happened to the bi-weekly updates on the world of Runeterra? Will we ever have lore updates as often as we used to? (or has both the quantity and quality dropped off.)

You did it once, why not now? Why is your narrative department not able to deliver the quality and quantity of content it has shown that it could deliver in the past?

What is the deal Riot? When will you finally tell us about how messed up your lore department is? It couldn't possibly be doing as bad a job as it is if there weren't some kind of problems.

Riot, I'm not pissed, I just want to have a dialogue with someone at Riot games who has some real answers about what has been going on in the last year or so.

Some areas in the game have seemed to be neglected in favor of e-sports, and I just wanna hear a Rioter in the know tell us about what RIot's priorities actually are.

Because myself, and I bet many other players like me, feel really neglected.

3 Comments

Helmight12/2/2014, 9:20:38 PM3 votes

Nothing's been neglected in favor of esports. Esports and lore are two different departments entirely - they're not going to grab writers from the lore department and make them go figure out esports stuff :P

I don't think it's that Riot doesn't care about the lore. I believe that it is instead that the lore department has been plagued by internal issues. I honestly feel as though the old writers left the organization, they hired new writers, and instead of working with the previous framework the new writers decided "hey, let's tear everything down so we can tell OUR stories, not the stories that we had previously!" Hence the Great Retcon.

Riot's been making an effort since then to actually do lore-related things. The Harrowing videos, Reborn, the Shurima event- all of those were lore-related, though not all of them were particularly successful. But Riot is still trying.

Dr Clueless PhD12/2/2014, 9:26:18 PM2 votes

The new direction for Lore isn't necessarily worse than the old one. It's certainly very different, but it's not necessarily worse. The old lore certainly brought everyone together, but was that really necessary? At times, it felt natural, but at other times it felt really forced and contrived. The lore existed as a way to justify the gameplay, and it felt that way. It felt artificial.

The new lore direction is free from that limitation. They can give us stories about Freljord, Shurima, the Shadow Isles, etc. without worrying about screwing up the gameplay tie-ins. Yeah, the quantity of lore updates has gone down. But, to say the quality has dropped seems a bit wrong to me. The Freljord and Shurima events gave us quite a bit of content, and it was GOOD content. It wasn't the periodic forced progression we were used to, but it's good material.

I was pissed when the JoJ went away. I was pissed about all the retcons. I was pissed about all of this, but I've gotten over it. I took a step back and looked at what they've given us with this new direction, and it's good stuff. I hated all of this because it was change, not because it was bad. And I know a number of people who have gone through the same exact thing.

Edit: Also, don't hate on retcons just because they're retcons. They're not inherently evil, even though it may feel that way sometimes.