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The Depressing Status of the Lore in League of Legends

Omnem Occido·6/6/2015, 2:39:44 AM·14 votes·1,534 views

I am just going to go ahead and say it: the lore in League of Legends is garbage. It's exceptionally bad outside of a few fleshed-out champions like Ashe. A short, three sentence paragraph makes each champion feel hollow on the inside. The best you will get to know them is via their in-game chatter, which is extremely bland for some champs (Rammus, Malphite, etc.) An example of one of the things that really depresses me is that they don't even explain Ekko at all. "The Boy Who Shattered Time" is an empty title without context, and his lore gives absolutely no insight into how he broke time, or the effects breaking time has on the world of Runeterra. The bad thing is, he's not the only one. So many more champions have little to no background, and quite a few of them amount to, "Really good at killing. Unknown origin. Joined League of Legends."

I am not sure if Riot recognizes this, but there are a bunch of really talented people within the League of Legends community that would love to write some lore for champions. They wouldn't even have to pay us. We'd do it for free, so long as we got the credit for it.

14 Comments

Agent20906/7/2015, 2:02:20 PM9 votes

I've pretty much been a silent observer during the last year. Watching as the more new lore that comes out leaves more questions and frustrations than answers, then when people post their concerns on the boards, it either gets ignored or a red comes in a says something along the lines of "we know we need to do better" and gives out some empty promises here and there.

Honestly, I think I'm done caring about the lore. I can't bring myself to get my hopes up that we'll get anything substantial any time soon. We get some lore that leaves many questions, then a post from a red saying "more to come in the future! We deliberately left out pretty much everything about everything in the characters' stories so we can reveal it later! Isn't that great!?"

So really, I'm no longer interested in the lore. I'll just make up my own in my head at this point. At least then I'll actually get something.

The Anagram King6/6/2015, 1:41:31 PM2 votes

Some of it is quite nice. AND some of it is quite creative.

...some. :P

I feel like, if I were part of a megacorporation, I would not want to be taking up fan creations unless there was a very tight system through which to do so. Plagiarism is a big deal from a legal standpoint, whilst continuity is a huge issue from a lore standpoint. Can you imagine the amount of poorly-written pieces that would be thrown at Riot upon announcing that they would take fan creations?

THEIR PLAYER BASE IS COMPRISED MOSTLY OF CHILDREN.

Even getting past that and reaching a point at which you've separated the well-written pieces from the poorly written ones, you then have to wade through the quality of the stories in general. There is so little chance that you're not going to have to hire an editing team and a whole list of readers and writers.

And, let's face it - if you're at the point that you're hiring an entire group of writers to read other people's fanfics, chances are you can just write your own fanfics instead.

I mean, I don't have any experience with a million dollar corporation with a crazy high fanbase or anything - but if I wanted to take on fanfics, I'd be doing it recreationally. I probably wouldn't be putting out calls for it.

Smaller groups with a smaller fanbase would likely be more open to the idea.

Darrosh Jewfist6/6/2015, 3:11:00 AM1 votes

I'm not sure how Ashe is a fleshed out champion.

GreenLore6/6/2015, 11:30:49 AM1 votes

Uhm League of legends isn't canon anymore,so no they didn't join the league.

Overall the narrative is approaching champs with a more episodic style.You know giving us different lore pieces that tell us different things about the champ,so that we get to know the champ step by step(the short lore in the client is only supposed to be a short summary,like the one on the back of a book). In Ekkos case,we got the video seconds and the comic about how he tried to save his friend Ajuna,which shows us what kind of person Ekko is,gives us a good indication of how his Z-Drive works within the lore,shows us what the street life of Zaun looks like,tells us about the kid on the mural and why Ekko has such a hate for Piltover.

However while this approach sounds nice on paper,the lore team currently fails to deliver on this.Many champs didn't even get their first lore-piece(like Rammus & Skarner ) and some pieces are really hard to find(the fall of Shurima,that told how Xerath ascended and got imprisoned was only released on Facebook and some full-lores have been only released on the boards).Not to mention that they don't follow up on these lore pieces,thus giving us next to no information about the champ,which can easily feel unsatisfying.