Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

Masks and champion design

Blood Magicks·3/21/2016, 2:46:28 PM·29 votes·28,735 views

Earlier in League history, these two charts appeared to point at boring champion design: The male and female body type charts.

I've recently been noticing a similar trend with the way humanoid champions of each gender are presented.

We already know that the male monster champions heavily outnumber the female monsters. So let's consider the humanoids only.

Male human (humanoid) champs (counting yordles because there are about as many female ones):

Female humanoid champs: (Wolf is just a glorified particle effect imo)

Now, which of these are masked?

Masked men: (it's sort of his face, we're not certain?) Headgear or things obscuring most of their faces:

Masked women:

Covering headgear:

Which of the masked men have skins that unmask them? , two of those do not count completely.

Which of the masked women have skins which unmask them? .

If I were very much into social issues, I would say that this is because male champs are for self-insertion and female champs are for waifu.

But I'm not. I'm just really into Jhin and Azir and am dying for an unmasked Jhin and a pre-ascension Azir. ~~I wish Malz, Zed and Shen would drop the hijab too tbh.~~

EDIT: Feel free to correct me by the way, this all is off the top of my head.

165 Comments

RiotKindlejack3/22/2016, 8:58:03 PM12 votes

Whether you are interested in Social Issues or not you make a good point. You could also highlight the PROJECT skins where the male champions had full masks while Leona had a half mask and Fiora's completely opened on recall.

From a visual design standpoint, when we are not looking at narrative or audio but just the small in-game model of a champion, covering the face often leaves the character feeling asexual and often assumed to be male (unless we exaggerate the body or show a lot of skin which often just looks bad on a masked character). But perhaps we could go the Dark Souls route and make a character that is assumed male until you hear the VO or read the lore? Although LoL is so heavily focused on gameplay that many players never read the lore or hear VO so we try not to rely on that in general. There would need to be a specific purpose for such a design decision. It's an interesting conversation that's well worth having.

From a product standpoint, Riot is fully focused on player experience and we know that our players do enjoy feminine beauty (as well as male beauty!) so we keep that in mind when designing skins or champions. I think there are times when it is appropriate and times when it isn't, but in a fantasy game I personally don't see anything wrong with a variety that includes a lot of beautiful characters. When you cover a characters face you also lose a lot of identity, which I think is why PROJECT and Blood Moon sometimes kept the visibility of the face beneath the mask. Players want to see the faces of female champions, and unless we have a good reason not to show them, we generally do.

Great observation, I would love to talk further about it if anyone has opinions to share.

macromite3/21/2016, 3:40:56 PM4 votes

just be happy there isn't a female urgot. we don't want that. no one wants that.