My thoughts on the whole "Dawngate" incident and lore.

EndGamer11·11/9/2014, 4:02:08 AM·27 votes·3,605 views

I heard about the closing of Dawngate, and I didn't care much. I heard they had some good lore, so I checked out their lore site. All I have to say is... wow. I would love a comic like that for LoL. It also seems that lots of people would like Riot to expand their lore, so I thought Riot could hire these people, and do something special for them.

Assign them to make a comic about the closing of the Institute of War. Have the Void break through into Runeterra (maybe through a Dusk Passage. Dawngate? Get it?) and wreak havoc. In the process of closing the Passage, the Nexuses need to be destroyed, leading to the destruction of the IoW as its magic crumbles around itself.

I think that these people have talent, and should be given a job at a good company, and I would very much enjoy seeing "The League Chronicles" come out.

21 Comments

CupcakeTrap11/9/2014, 8:23:02 AM13 votes

Physically destroying the Institute of War wouldn't end the League. What would end the League would be the member states walking away. That might be the result of gradually mounting dissatisfaction, or it might be another Kalamanda, where the League puts its foot down and issues an ultimatum—but, unlike in Kalamanda, the member states don't swerve.

My go-to example: the U.S. Supreme Court. If you were to blow up the Supreme Court building, it wouldn't destroy the judicial branch. They'd move the Justices to new office space and continue. (Likewise, if you blew up the League, but the factions' underlying motivations for having the League remained, they'd probably just rebuild it.) What would cause a constitutional crisis would be the Supreme Court issuing a ruling that the rest of the government refused to follow. "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"

That said, one way to produce this scenario would be to eliminate the Rune Wars threat. Maybe a bunch of nexuses blow up, and somehow the ethereal fabric of Runeterra shifts, so that large-scale battle-magic no longer threatens planet-wide catastrophe. Before, the League would be inclined to either tell warring factions to take it to the Fields, or at least draw boundaries. ("You guys can fight over Shurima, but the fighting stays in Shurima, and no more large-scale troop deployments there.") And factions would generally listen, because at the end of the day none of them want an apocalypse—that's the main reason the League was founded, because they collectively realized that unchecked warfare would doom them all.

Without the threat of another Rune War, that's both less necessary and more difficult to pull off. The League would still presumably act as a forum for negotiation, and factions may well have reasons other than avoiding a Rune War to want the League to referee their conflicts. And there are plenty of smaller disputes that factions would continue bringing to the League just out of convenience, like arguments over terms of trade. Still, the removal of the Rune Wars threat would probably downscale the significance of the League.

Dregen11/9/2014, 10:33:46 AM7 votes

Honestly, the closing of Dawngate sort of proves that working on "awesome" lore is less important than developing gameplay and characters that appeal to the general audience.

I don't mind LoL having good lore, but i agree that it shouldnt really be a priority for them - I'd rather have better champs and balancing.

WereScrib11/10/2014, 5:41:11 AM4 votes

...Dawngate also had an adorable lesbian romance between otters.

I legitimately am really sad the game's going under. In numerous ways it just outperformed most of its competitors. It was also honestly interesting. A higher jungle focus, rotation-based gameplay even in the early game, role selection. It was brilliant as hell as soon as you began getting into it.

Azur0Ronin11/9/2014, 8:35:06 AM4 votes

Dawngate has some really good lore and story that's totally worth saving. :) #MOBAsUnited

http://www.dawngate.com/chronicles/prologue/1/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dawngate/comments/2lq49s/an_open_letter_to_ea_executives/

LordHippoman11/9/2014, 8:48:37 PM4 votes

Dawngate closed because they couldn't pull in the numbers to sustain themselves. The MOBA genre is incredibly hard to break into, simply because two of the biggest games in the world, LoL and DOTA 2, are already sitting pretty at the top spots.

You can only survive if you can find something that appeals to people that can't find it in these already enormous and free games, and there's not much there. Smite, for example, managed to do a 3rd person perspective combined with a mythology angle, and that's a novel enough idea that it can survive. That DC MOBA I'm forgetting the name of will probably pull in some players on recognizable characters from the comics alone.

Dawngate tried using a more capture points esque mode, instead of the 3 Lane model used in DOTA and conventional LoL. Dominion comes to mind, and we all know how that went over. Popular for a few months, and now almost deserted except by people who really, really like it.

The game might have pulled itself up if given more time, but it's EA. They have a million games to work on, and it's not going to hurt them to cut one, unlike with Riot, who make one single game, or Hi-Rez, who work on 3.

If anything, it is kind of a sad mark on the importance of Lore. Dawngate had great Lore, but it still wasn't a popular game, and the story couldn't save it. A lot of MOBA players just aren't into Lore. Which is a shame, but until circumstances change, it sadly makes better business sense to write an article about some professional player's opinions on Lux than write a story about Lux or whatever.

Tsunday11/10/2014, 6:06:39 AM3 votes

Umm no. The people who worked on Dawngate worked so hard on the lore because some of them wanted nothing more than that game to live and breathe. For some of them Dawngate was the dream and that's why the lore was amazing. It's not something special for them if you take the artist (who is also the artist of the book based off the new Maleficient movie btw) and ask him to work on LoL lore. That's not DG lore, it's not what they're passionate about and it isolates half of the team to begin with.

If you wanted to see Moba chronicles you should have played Dawngate.

Dotintheparadox11/11/2014, 12:54:58 AM2 votes

Unfortunately the current narrative team is soo infatuated with their own ideas, instead of actually giving the community something that actually works with the original premise, they're being selfish bitches who are too scared to actually deal with any of us other than through one member who doesn't stop making jokes.

The community wants what you're suggesting, far more than anything these asses of literature have given us. Ultimately however, the community is the one responsible what's canon and what's not. So far, most of us still say the IoW is the true canon, so by default, it is, no matter how hard the "writers" or a vocal minority try to bury it.

Pikmints11/10/2014, 3:16:43 AM1 votes

With Riot currently rewriting significant portions of the lore, I see this being a possibility once they get enough of their lore in a configuration they find appropriate. We will need at least a few groups to be rewritten before we can expect anything along the lines of comics and such, as right now we have Shurima and a few outliers handled if I'm not mistaken.

Once we get some Piltover and Bilgewater stuff taken care of, we can have a story made between Caitlyn apprehending some individuals and Nautilus relentlessly hunting them down, local law enforcement keeping them safe from this attempted vigilante.

Once Demacia and The Shadow Isles get added to the list, we can have a political conflict between the likes of Vayne that want to suppress all life on the Isle through violence and Piltover that desires to study it, discovery of various weapons and methods/mentality justifying the side of Piltover and violent acts against civilians and often mindless creatures justifying Demacia's beliefs.

Get Bandle City rewritten (and yordles biologically coherent) and they can go on to have their already existing political issues with Bilgewater handled, some mischievous individuals there trying to agitate the conflict between GP and MF on Bilgewater's future.

We should expect nothing though until these areas and their associated champions get their details handled by Riot so that the world they created is more welcoming to stories of such endeavors without the previously necessary aspect of why they are getting politically or personally involved with this battle arena where they get shot, reaped, and mauled while working together with those they are solely there to hunt down.

P0IS0N IVY11/9/2014, 9:58:22 PM1 votes

The reason why Riot has stopped paying attention to lore is because there are not enough players who care and they can't really get anything out of making it better. Riot can better invest their money into making new skins, e$ports, adding to the gameplay itself, etc. The fact is proven by their recent actions that have completely invalidated all previous lore. Not to mention any new stuff about Shurima and what not are completely boring and shallow. "Lore" remains for the sole purpose of making the game look cool. There isn't actually a story anywhere.

Cookiehime11/9/2014, 9:06:48 PM1 votes

I hope that at least the writers and comic artists are allowed to keep the stories going. Seriously, they could keep making Dawngate comics. I'd love to see that continue because they were great.

OuttaControl5611/9/2014, 8:31:14 PM1 votes

That was my idea for the IoW going away.

Summoners nearly allow the Void to inflitrate Runeterra, close shop as a result.

Summoners spread out amongst the land....