Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

The Lore Retcon Dilemma

Electro522·11/19/2014, 10:28:06 AM·4 votes·1,249 views

http://news.cdn.leagueoflegends.com/public/images/nc/media/Freljord_Wallpaper_thumb.jpg

So, as many of us are all very aware of, this community is ABLAZE with comments and threads begging Riot to explain why they chose to completely redo the lore, and remove the Institute of War. Thus, I want to add my two cents to the whole dilemma.

So, just to give a little backstory as to what happened, in case any of you rock dwellers are just now crawling out of your comfy little holes, Riot released this: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/creative-spotlight/dev-blog-exploring-runeterra

This dev blog was the first announcement about the removal of the Institute of War, Summoners, and the re-imagining of the lore of Runeterra as a whole. This sparked a community wide rage fest, and for about a month, Riot went silent on the issue. Now, unfortunately, going silent was a mistake. The lack of response from Riot only fueled the already raging fire, and countless people either voiced their concerns, or practically yelled at Riot for not doing their job the they should have.

Then, the Shurima Event: http://promo.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/shurima/index.html?ref=en_NA_pvpt_shurima912#

This event essentially gave us a little sneak peak into Riot's plans for the lore. Just like what they did with the Freljord, Riot made Shurima an actual location, instead of some rumor or myth tossed around Runeterra. But, the most drastic changes to the lore came to the on client lore changes. Riot changed the lore of several champions from basically short stories, to just simple paragraphs. This change sparked the fire once again, and now that we actually got to see what Riot had in store for all of the champs, people were not happy about it.

And yet, Riot remained quiet on the subject. The community seemed to get more and more upset with Riot, and now, not so much about the lore, but more about the lack of communication, of which Riot is somewhat known for.

Finally, we had some response from Riot, with (I think) Morello (please correct me if I'm wrong) saying that they indeed had several parts of the lore ready to come out, but, were facing technical issues in getting everything out. Apparently, the lore will have its very own website, but the creation of the website is not letting them move forward with their plans. This seemed to calm the community just a bit, and soon, all of the rage was turned towards the Cassiopeia rework (which is for a different discussion all together).

Soon after that, Riot released the Azir and Xerath stories here on the forums. Overall, they got a positive review from the community, and plenty of feels for Azir as he watches his own family be blown away (sniffs). They realized their mistake on staying too quiet on the issue, and restated the fact that they were having technical issues with getting the new lore out. These two stories were a sneak peak into what Riot had in store.

And thus, we come to where we are now. There are still some threads and comments here and there, still asking Riot for something of an update, or as to why they are still staying quiet on the subject. Well, allow me to give a little comparison:

Lets say, one of your closest friends is soon going to have their birthday. You and several of your other friends plan this MASSIVE surprise party for your friend, and you want to make it as awesome and amazing as humanly possible. You want your friend to practically faint when they see this party!

In order to keep this party a secret, you have to keep the details from your friend, no matter how much they pick and prod at you about it. However, they know you have something planned, because in the past, you have put on similar events for other people, and now, they are eagerly waiting their turn for their big moment.

Unfortunately, you run into issues. Something doesn't get ordered, or something isn't made correctly. So many things go wrong that you ultimately have to postpone the party........past your friends birthday.

Their birthday rolls around, your friend is expecting it all, but.............nothing happens. Your friend starts asking you questions, asking why you seemingly gave up on your awesome party planning, but, you can't do anything but not respond to any of their questions. The big surprise is still coming, but you can't give away any of the details due to you wanting it to be a surprise. After awhile, your friend eventually gets upset with you due to your lack of communication, but as much as you want to tell them.......you can't. You simply do not want to spoil the surprise.

Riot is in a very similar situation. Yes, we already know many of the details, and there probably won't be any big party at the end, but it is very similar. Riot does not want to give away too much of the details on the lore, because it will spoil the surprise they have. Riot wants to get this new lore out, they want to talk to us all about it SO FRICKEN BAD..........but they can't.

These technical issues are keeping them from releasing the lore. While they can let us see the lore they have made, it won't be as near as big of a surprise if they wait for the tech issues to clear up. Doing that would be like taking your friend out to eat, instead of planning this awesome party, making the surprise very lack luster.

[TL;DR] (You really should just read the entire post)

So, all in all, PLEASE quit yelling at Riot for ruining the game. Quit yelling at them for being too quiet on the subject. Quit yelling at them for completely redoing the lore! If you sit down, shut up, and be patient, I'll bet everything I have that you, and everyone else in the League community will completely forget that there ever was an Institute of War!

Runeterra will be a far bigger, and far more interesting place after the changes finally roll out. So what if the game will be disconnected from the lore? In my opinion, Riot should have done that in the first place! The interactions between the characters will actually have meaning, instead of just all of them wanting to kill each other! The champions will no longer be mindless puppets that some odd sorcerer controls for an hour. Runeterra will actually see real conflict, and that conflict be solved in real ways, instead of one single entity handling all of the conflict for an entire continent!

Doesn't that all sound extremely interesting and exciting to you? League of Legends is a constantly evolving game, and we all know that. Why shouldn't the lore evolve as well?

In the meantime, I wish you all good luck on the Rift Electro522

13 Comments

Sneak Dog11/19/2014, 10:48:00 AM7 votes

Except that Riot is planning to bulldoze our house and build a new one in its stead, which might be worse than the first house, but doesn't want to give us the blueprints of the new house because it should be a surprise.

Also, Riot could have made Runeterra a bigger place without retcon. Without replacing the premise of the lore along with multiple characters. Without replacing the spot where every single champion was able to interact with another without killing him immediately.

Two mistakes you made: Champions were not puppets, a summoning of a champion merged the minds of both. Conflict was happening, Kalamanda was all cloak and dagger and the League doesn't stop every small skirmish.

I'm not excited, I'm wary. Riot has shown to be willing to retcon one of my favorite characters out of the game, shown to be willing to retcon the entire foundation of their lore. For reasons I can only call because they wanted large-scale war and because it suited them. **I can't trust Riot **not to retcon anything that suits them, so I can't invest in this new lore, in the new characters because for all I know they'll get retconned out unceremoniously like Trundle.

Gross11/19/2014, 11:00:49 AM5 votes

I wouldn't expect anyone to be this naive.

The lore team has yet to deliver, it's all talk and no action. Or rather little to no talk and no action.

The thing is, they implemented the retcon, but they have yet to fix it to make it coherent. And it's been several months since the retcon happened, but the lore remains in it's catastrophic state. How much longer is this shit going to take? It really makes me question their decisions and ability to preserve the lore now AND in the future.

If the problems in fixing and rewriting the lore is directly the cause of something the lore team can't help, then Riot comes off as ridiculously amateurish! These things should be thought out BEFORE laying the foundations.

DG Ashabel11/19/2014, 1:29:07 PM5 votes

Did you somehow miss the ten quadribajillion angry threads about how sick people are of epic surprise reveals and everything associated with them?

By going with your analogy with the surprise birthday party, imagine that you have a friend who keeps throwing you surprise birthday parties that are universally terrible and everyone in your social circle hates them. He always orders the wrong beverages, hires his cousin's friend's trashy "indie rock" band, invites strippers to wedding anniversaries and so on. Everyone in the city--no, the entire state hates parties planned by that guy. Whenever they hear about him involved in some planning, they approach him and say "Hey man, we don't want these things you're planning. Could you please stop trying to do this?". But all he does in response is turn on the puppy eyes, quiver his lip and say "B-b-bluh-but I already planned out so much and I swear you're going to like it this time..!"

Because that description is much more accurate, as far as people's reaction to lore updates goes.

Diahane11/21/2014, 5:05:48 PM3 votes

Runeterra will be a far bigger, and far more interesting place after the changes finally roll out. So what if the game will be disconnected from the lore? In my opinion, Riot should have done that in the first place! The interactions between the characters will actually have meaning, instead of just all of them wanting to kill each other! The champions will no longer be mindless puppets that some odd sorcerer controls for an hour. Runeterra will actually see real conflict, and that conflict be solved in real ways, instead of one single entity handling all of the conflict for an entire continent!

You killed an old-lore lover for each and any of this words ç_ç

Summoners, as the JoJ stated, were not puppeteers and summoning required the summoner and the champion to synchronize and fuse together into a whole new being existing in the microcosm of the FoJ. Characters didn't want to all kill each other before, this is most wrong. For instance, Jax and Gragas were drinking buddies and in general champions did what they wanted in their free time. Morgana had a bakery in Noxus, Taric was involved in a musical and so on. Champions had their hobbies and motivations in the old lore, they were not dead-set on killing each other and instead interacted in creative ways. Evelynn and Twisted Fate had a love story for instance and held most-sought tango lessons together. Champions' interactions were not forbidden by the old lore's structure at all, they were a built-in feature instead, since every champion could know the others through the IoW and they were famous figures worldwide. On the conflict note, in the old lore there was Noxus invading Ionia, Ionia protesting (Lee Sin got blind setting himself on fire to protest), Malzahar and Kassadin clashing, with Kassadin's daughter getting kidnapped and offered to the void, Swain conspiring with an IoW's higher-up to trade Kalamanda to the IoW in exchange for setting up a situation which would lead Swain to rise to the role of Grand General of Noxus... "Conflicts" and "real ways to solve them" don't necessarily mean that everything must be a full scale war on the fields of Runeterra. In the real world, most things are dealt in different ways, through more refined means, such as politics and economics. War usually is the last step and means that someone has failed at the real game and has to force things through it. The Kalamanda arc was a superb example of conflict between parties solved in a most refined way. Besides, open-field wars could still happen with the IoW existing for a number of reasons you'll find listed on the boards in various threads on the subjects. To this, I'd add that actually wars fought on the battlefield shift the attention to masses of faceless men, while League's a game about Champions, individuals. Also, champions not related to big political factions (hello Nidalee! Hi Rengar! 'sup Annie in your exile in the wilds?) become devoid of any global scope relevance, which is bad in a game focused on Champions.

I could go on and on on the subject, what I'd like to have conveyed is the message that great thought and a great number of reasonings have been made about the subject; people are not complaining about it because they're stupid and can't think of the fact that maybe Riot wants to surprise us. People who complain, like me, do so because Riot surprises on the matter have been awful, are headed along a terrible way and aren't even well down. Besides, Riot's arguments on the matter have been questioned non-stop with very logical and polite counterarguments only to be met with silence or the occasional restatement of the same phrases. We are complaining because we care, not because we want to vex Riot, that wouldn't even make sense, since probably most of what we write doesn't even reach nor bothers them.

The Whamboozler11/21/2014, 5:25:40 PM3 votes

It doesn't really change the fact that a lot of people liked the old lore about summoners, national rivalries and politics, intrigue, and the Institute of War. They liked the judgements and the idea that they themselves were characters in this world. No matter how good the new lore is (And I would still say it's not very good anyways) it's divorced from the players themselves. The game we play has no place in the new lore. A bunch of people fighting in a big forest for no reason. Sure, Azir got a big snazzy pile of videos about his lore, but LoL is a GAME. And games are almost always stronger when the player is given a personal stake or attachment in their story. Even in the world's worst knock-off FPS, where story matters less than the endless shooting of things, there is a story and you or the character you play are personally involved. Azir's story has nothing to do with any of us, and it never will. It's just a movie. We're not characters in the lore anymore, and the summoner's rift (a name now dripping with irony) doesn't exist in the game's world either. At least, not the one we play in. There's no reason for it any more. There's no excuse for the fighting anymore. Every match you've ever had means nothing in the lore and you yourself are non canon. THAT is why people are upset. Because their personal attachment to the game is gone. We don't matter anymore and our matches don't matter. They happen in some separate dimension that doesn't connect with the current lore at all and the have nothing at all to do with any of the stories that riot is spending all this time and money to write. And if you spend all that effort making something that REDUCED immersion in your game, you've done something wrong.

Alljoy11/19/2014, 11:39:33 AM3 votes

It looks more like the lore is devolving rather than evolving but I guess we'll have to wait on this 'surprise' of theirs.

Earl Eulrich11/19/2014, 12:46:41 PM2 votes

Yea, and the Chinese gouvernment will make democratic elections in HongKong reality....i really don´t know why these people should demonstrate there (and risk their lives/freedom over it) *roll eyes*

Jeddy01711/19/2014, 7:58:07 PM1 votes

From some of the things I read,a number of people who wants communications with the lore team aren't asking to know the major spoiler of a movie.They want communication to be involved in the development area.To discuss to directions & ideas of a character,faction,story,etc.To be part of the process basically.

They want a Rioter to make a thread saying,"What are some ideas for blank?" Or,"Guys,we're thinking of doing this with blank.What do you think?"A place where discussion can happen & people can post their ideas & talk about it with fellow lore fans AND THE LORE TEAM or TEAM MEMBER (ideally the lore team or the rioter should be involved).Ideally during the idea stage where writers are trying to figure out what's a good idea for blank.

Yeah,we got people asking for content.To know who ends up with who.But,it seems to me that more people just want simple discussion & to actually have an impact on future lore content.

But this is just my observation.

DragonShea11/19/2014, 11:30:00 AM1 votes

Well it's good to hope. I just that this will be true and nothing dumbass non sense spoken out loud but time will tell.

Centuros11/19/2014, 8:17:54 PM1 votes

We need more art like that one you have in the OP, showing places and events in Runeterra. That would go a long way to making the world a more coherent place in the fans' minds.