Please Pause the Champion Releases, Let Lore Team Breathe

Penta Penguin·4/25/2015, 1:50:36 AM·6 votes·1,210 views

I can't know for sure, but I think this is part of why the lore team is struggling so much to get through everything they have to do. Every little bit of progress they make on old content and retcons, gets buried under new ones.

They started telling us about the new Freljord, more details about our Freljord characters, but then comes new Shurima, and now they have to tell us all about that. Then there are champions, lost in the chaos, like Gnar, Aatrox, Vel'koz, etc. who are underwhelmingly developed with only a small introduction and no follow-up.

Now the pressure on the lore team comes back to haunt the new champion releases; such as Aatrox, who is practically a walking cliff-hanger;

Bard, who has come around to take "something" from "somewhere" that was "threatening the universe", and you probably shouldn't hold your breath to figure out any more about that. Normally "threatening the universe" is pretty important, end-game stuff worth fleshing out, but whatever;

Gnar, he's woken up after 40943 years of stasis, and... the end!

Jinx, who herself was refreshing development for Piltover, but leaves us with an underwhelming "who wins" quest on the Rift, which isn't even canon anymore anyway, as well as more questions about who she is and where she came from (I'd love to meet your crazy sister, stop reminding me);

When will Yasuo ever get to turn around and fight against the conspiracy that doomed him?

They can get in line behind the dozen Shurima champions who still need their lore written out (again), and likely not before another locale and its champions get retconned to help "develop" the world and story.

Old champions like Jax and Fiddlesticks can't hope to see any development or have their characters fleshed out amidst all of these widescale retcons where they don't fit, and new champions with storylines that are left open.

I think Riot should scale up their content releases, save whatever they're working on for the big show. Freljord and Shurima should have been fully developed and publicized as almost an expansion pack before releasing any of it.

A focus also needs to be maintained on projects and story that are already underway, before new ones begin.

125+ champions are plenty, and more characters than pretty much any video game has ever had. I hate to think that champions like Aatrox, Gnar or Bard exist only because of some kind of release schedule, and their stories are just frames to deliver a skill kit. If that's what characters have come down to, from a company that is trying to emphasize their story and world, then mistakes are definitely being made!

10 Comments

Ebonmaw Dragon4/25/2015, 2:22:10 AM4 votes

We had more lore when they released champs every 2 weeks.

The Soulforged4/25/2015, 1:57:27 AM1 votes

You act as if champs being release so frequently (every 6 months) is an excuse for the lore team as for why they aren't creating any new lore...

SaltyToplaneGoat4/25/2015, 3:58:21 AM1 votes

They had enough room to breath over the last YEARS...

XxLegitMrRAWRxX4/26/2015, 1:13:51 AM1 votes

I think riot needs to take more time to make better champions. This would help everything out. Bard is in my opinion a really bad champion in general. If they took more time to create these champs and spent this time wisely then lore team could do work and the champions wouldnt be as "dumb" me and 3 of my friends spent and hour discussing the recent champions and feel like they are just getting worse and worse. Vel'koz was pretty good along with gnar, Braum started to fall off a little bit and now with Azir and Bard they just don't have the quality they used to and I don't like that.