Sorry I haven't stuck my head in here until now. I always say it's been a hectic few weeks as we're a busy bunch of folks. And that's the part that can be confusing, and annoying, due to the expectations we have not met. Frankly, Saturday nights are currently the time I'm most able to sit down and put together a semi-cogent response on here. My apologies for that.
To help with clarity, and for a common place to start from, I'll reiterate what I've said elsewhere on the board when it comes to a misunderstanding of what Narrative is.
At Riot we work from a matrixed concept of Disciplines and Product Teams. Disciplines are made up of people of a distinctive craft. Product Teams are made up of people from various disciplines (crafts) who work together to make something. This thing may be to make something for purely external means or to go to the players. Product team does not mean "thing to sell." It can be something that players pay for or not. It can be something made to go to players, or not.
With that in mind, this is what Narrative is: We are a distinct discipline made up of people who are focused on the development of characters and stories through ideation and writing. We help ensure thematic cohesion on various products, develop archetypes and personalities, and we help solve creative problems using character, story, and world building. We also write stories because we pretty much love to. You haven't seen enough of them. Yet. There are numerous reasons for this that we are working to solve. In this case, "we" means Riot.
We employ our craft on various Product Teams. For example, on League of Legends, we have Narrative Writers who work on Champion Team, Champion Update, Events, Promo and beyond. On Champion Team, the Narrative Writers spend a lot of time being part of the creative teamwork, in conjunction with a lot of other disciplines, in making new, exciting Champions that are thought out down to a molecular level when it comes to their identity.
As you cited Ekko, I'll talk to him in particular.
From a Narrative standpoint, FauxSchizzle was the principal Narrative writer working on the Ekko Champion team with a large number of people from different disciplines (Art, Game Design etc.). He helped with concepting the character's personality with the team, including writing story sketches (think of them as concept story, you'll likely be seeing an example of this pretty soon) that helped everyone get a clear picture of who the Champion is.
Taking a Champion from ideation, through production, to release is a very taxing, involved job due to wanting to make the best Champion possible each and every time. That's the same for artists, designers and writers of various specializations.
Faux was also the principal writer on Seconds (Ekko's animation) and Chronobreak (his comic). On all of his work, from concepting to launch, Faux received support from various members of Narrative in the form of edits, feedback and writers room sessions. No matter what the team is, we support each other in our work, because that's what makes us Narrative and Rioters.
Ekko was one of three champions that Faux has been working on.
The reason I'm outlining this is to clarify and dispute one assertion: Lore team isn't doing anything.
Firstly, Narrative isn't a "lore team," as the above explanation may help clarify. What we have been doing is working on a variety of Product Teams that make a multitude of things for players. We are more than busy in doing so, hence we have been pushing very hard to hire more superb writers to join us.
The short character intros are developed by Narrative as part of the work done for Champion Team, or Champion Update.
They are Narrative's direct responsibility on those teams, and I will say that we have heard you and others very clearly on your displeasure with the shorter introductions to the Champion. The fact is, they have always been intended as a quick overview for folks who don't want to hit a wall of text in the client, particularly in a format that was very inflexible for us. The plan was to release short intros and then have longer stories on the website.
Then, when initially trying to implement this, we discovered a technical issue made it impossible to do so. We didn't think it would take long to fix.
We were wrong.
Thankfully, it seems we have finally got a solution in place and you'll be seeing the fruits of that development within the next month when we'll be releasing some stuff (stuff = things I can't spoil) that will take advantage of the new tech capability.
While we have been waiting to sort these issues out, it's given us the time to look at our content goals. Much of that desire to question our direction for the specific intros/bios/stories (as they have been in various iterations), has been due to the consternation expressed on these boards. We led an effort to try and drive on short stories to go along with those character intros. When we saw the vocal assertion that something like the old bio format would still be welcome even with those stories, we took another look at what we were doing.
We anted something that gave the meat of certain details of the old bios, while still feeling current and not creating a sense of that Champion's life being static.
Ant in Oz pitched a format that makes a lot of sense and it's currently going through fine tuning. To give you an idea though, it's the current introductory paragraph, followed by a background or bio section with some details and story hooks to stimulate understanding and conversation, followed by a quick story that shows the Champion being who they are. They are certainly more in-depth than the current intros and I'm confident of their quality.
We've formed an impromptu team of Narrative folks doing some extra hours to start formalizing a process, discussing character pitches and then getting them written. We're prioritizing them based on the needs of Product Teams as well as how broken they are. For example, Singed is one that I've personally put an outline together for. I won't talk about the others due to spoilers.
I understand the overall frustration completely. We're working on moving things in a much more satisfactory direction than has been the case in the last couple of years, but this will never be a case of Narrative deciding to do things on its own, we always work within Product Teams and the priorities are made by Riot as a whole and then within those teams.
We take our specific responsibility very seriously though. As a discipline we need to do better, and I think folks we've brought on like FauxSchizzle are helping us do that. We try to put as much story as we can into everything we do as we are storytellers by trade and by passion. Story isn't the main product of every team we work on, however.
So while I understand that it is, at times, difficult to pick out Narrative's work from within things made by teams (if we're doing it right, you won't be able to for much of the time), please don't mistake that for us not doing anything.
That simply is not true.
I get a bit protective of Narrative as it's my day-to-day responsibility to ensure we are meeting the needs of Riot's many teams, so I have to rein in my urge to leap to their defense each time we are said to be doing nothing. I stop myself because though the details might not always be accurate, the overall sense of being let down, of not having enough prepared and in place after the reset blog announcement, is utterly valid.
The difference comes from perspective. I know precisely how hard the members of Narrative work. I know how many hours Faux and numerous others (including those not on Narrative) put in to make Ekko as a Champion, Seconds as an animation, and Chronobreak as a comic, the best they could be. It's no small effort.
I know until the content that you desire is available to you, it's difficult to see what it is that we're actually doing. I hope this post at least gives you a little insight into how things are.
Sorry for the long post, I hope I kept it at least mainly coherent, but I'm a bit knackered.
These posts bother me constantly and are in the back of my mind every day. It's not because of the sometimes unfortunate tone, it's because of the underlying truth. We need to not just tell you how we're trying to get better at putting things in your hand, we need to put them in your hand.
I'm very excited for the next month or so.
