Im abit behind on lore, so reading the boards today I notice people saying that the institute got removed from the lore. Can someone explain this to me? I have a decent idea how it was in old lore, and no idea how it is now. If someone could do before/after thing, that'd be great.
This might take a while.
On September 5, 2014, then head of the Riot Games Narrative team, Tom "TommyGnox" Abernathy, announced a plan to remove/separate Summoners, the Institute of War and the "League of Legends" from the game's story. This announcement was done through a Dev Blog instead of their long ignored lore discussion forums.
The announcement was met with about the same enthusiasm as a toothache removal if your dentist was Jason Voorhees, his "pretty" assistant was Leatherface and the only thing to kill the pain was a children's strength aspirin.
However, this plan was actually initialized two years earlier when Karma received her rework in June 2012. While fans of the character was most concerned about the loss of her... "fans," Karma's story was rewritten to remove all mention of the "League of Legends" and the Institute of War.
Other reworks had other distractions to keep people from noticing this change (Katarina lost all mention of her father and her story became that of "Generic assassin with breasts" and Soraka's lore rework changed Warwick, ruined Singed (which has not been fixed either), did not include the long-awaited "Battle Priestess" skin, etc.
So yeah, Riot's been trying to remove Summoners from the game for a long time. It's only now that we're fully aware of it.
Everything before Azir is potentially non-canon.
It's up in the air.
Imagine if Ubisoft announced that, in the Assassin's Creed series, the animus never existed and this was a sign of how committed they were to telling us what was going on in their story. Because that's kind of what happened.
Before: League Exists. After: League doesn't.
Was pretty basic. They're in the process of rewriting lores that depended on the institute, and things like Kalamanda are still canon. (Swain still overthrew Boram, at least)
Essentially everything in the old lore is still cannon for the most part, just not the League or IoW. If something in the old lore involves the League or IoW just remove those instances from whatever your reading. If that leaves gaping plot holes (Lee Sin, for instance) than that's something Riot is working on filling.
