What’s up guy’s it’s me Jeremy.
Azir is a champion that has gone through one of the most lengthy and detailed timelines
of development.
He was worked on for about three years, until his eventual release on September 16th, 2014,
and during those three years, his kit went through numerous redesigns and other development
cycles, so join me today in taking a look at the 3 years before his release, to see
what Azir could have been.
Here are some of my favorite comments where I asked what your favorite thing about the
league of legends beta was.
For a chance to be featured in a future video, leave a comment about what your favorite thing
about Azir is.
If you enjoy the video hit the like button, and if you dont hit the dislike, and if this
video hits 15,000 ratings I’ll make another one of these for a different champion.
Anyways, let’s get started.
The champion that would eventually become to be known as Azir began development right
after the release of Ahri, so around December 2011.
But Riot doesn’t usually give the full name to a champion until they are almost done,
so he didn’t really have a name at first, but was just designed around the concept of
being some kind of Egyptian character, but eventually was given the codename Seth, in
reference to the Egyptian god of war.
He was orgingally developed with the concept of being a sand mage, involving lore from
the shurima desert, and using sand magic as an overall theme for his abilities.
The sand mage as a character had a couple of leaks early on, from his original conception,
that showcased his concept art, and hinted at a few abilities by showing some of his
icons.
This leak was so detailed for a character that was cancelled, that the community generally
regarded them as fake at the time, but they would eventually become seen as real elements
of his early design stages.
Although we never received any hints for the original design of his kit, this single picture
shows quite a bit of some of his design ideas, and you can maybe take some guesses at what
his original intentions might have been.
Based on the power level distributions we can speculate that he had some kind of a tanky
hybrid playstyle, and was a little bit less mage-like than hi name makes him appear, based
on his magic power rating.
I’m not gonna try to guess what those ability icons could have been, but maybe the icons
did hint a little bit as to what his abilities could have been, but those concept arts and
design looked pretty awesome, but also not too far off from what Azir eventually became.
However, although Seth was deemed to have an awesome concept and be a great starting
point for the design of a champion, Riot wasn’t able to work out a kit for him, and although
he spent a lot of time in development, it was taking too long, and so he was cancelled.
Champion designer Morello expressed in 2012 that Seth as a character concept existed,
and had a pretty cool design, so although they were cancelling him for the time being,
it was likely that they would come back to him in the future.
Eventually Seth would be revisted, just as Morello had stated, and here is when we start
to delve into the details of the original designs of his kit.
After designing a bunch of straight forward mage kits, Riot decided that the Sand mage
angle, wasn’t the concept that they wanted to approach Azir with, and so they shifted
his character to be more of a commander or emperor kind of focus, deciding that that
was the story they wanted Azir as a character to capture.
And so a big team of Rioters sat down, split off into groups, in a hackathon-esque event,
to work out some different kits and design different ideas for the possibilities, all
with the standing theme of using soldiers.
And some of his early abilities that were settled on, turned out to be really crazy.
One of his earliest designs came from champion designer Ezreal, who worked out an ultimate
the the rioters called Sand Hands, which would cause two giant hands to rise up from the
ground, and after a delay, move together and push everyone between them together, squishing
them in.
However, this was deemed to be way too powerful, and was scapped completely as the playtesters
suffered nightmares from the sand hands.
As well, another one of the original designs for his ultimate was this super complex ability
that spawned 3 obelisks in a triangle, with lasers linking them together, and anyone inside
took extra damage if azir attacked them, and would also take damage for crossing the lazers.
In addition, azir received a shield based on the damage the obelisks dealt, and if the
shield got big enough, Azir would ascend and gain a massive amount of spell vamp, ap, a
doubled shield, and movementspeed.
This ability was shelved because it was deemed, as Zenon put it “disgustingly overloaded
and overcomplicated”, but you can’t deny that that ability sounds epic, and that ultimate
had a kit that involved using sand as an actual resource that you would gather, and could
spam sand missiles from the sources of sand that you gathered.
Another variation of his kit had an ultimate that created a sandstorm that covered the
entire map and slowed enemies globally across the whole game, but again that idea was a
bit too crazy.
All of his original kits used soldiers as a common theme in their kits somehow, one
used them as three targetable guards that moved in a formation in front of you and blocked
skill shots, and you could reactivate the ability to send the soldiers forward as an
attack, another kit summoned soldiers that charged forwards and knocked back enemies,
and a third kit had an ability to spawn soldiers, which you could then launch as a skillshot
to attack enemies.
Among all the various bits and pieces of that grab bag of abilities I just listed, Riot
put together a kit that they thought was good and had potential, to be developed further.
He was originally made to attack along side his soldiers, treating them as somewhat of
a summoned pet, but eventually they came up with the idea that it was much cooler and
unique if his soldiers were to attack instead of him, rather than on top of, and that was
the brainblast that set the design of Azir in motion.
And eventually he was given a finalized kit, which actually was still a bit different to
his kit today.
Azir’s first official kit that was finalized about a month before he was put on PBE, and
used in internal testing looked like this: His passive was sand soldiers, which summoned
a soldier for 12 seconds every time a minion or monster died, or after damaging an enemy
champion.
His abilities interacted with the soldiers and moved them around, but would reduce their
duration by 2 seconds, and every time a soldier collided with an enemy champion, they would
explode, knocking them back, and dealing damage.
His Q was Quicksands, which caused all active soldiers to dash to an area, and after a half
second delay, the quicksand would deal magic damage to enemies inside and root them for
1 second.
His E was Castle, which would cause him to switch places with one of his summoned sand
soldiers.
His W was called “To Me” which would call all sand soldiers to his current position,
and then summon additional sand soldiers on his former position when he activated the
ability.
And as for his ultimate, it didn’t have a name, and we don’t have the ability details
like we do for the rest of his original kit, but Zenon is quoted as saying that it summoned
9 additional sand soldiers.
Anyways that was one of his most thought out iterations of early designed which existed
in closed beta testing, but was never released to the public in any way.
And there’s a lot of tweets from Daniel Klein, aka ZenonTheStoic, who was the head
champion designer for Azir, quoting those specific details and images.
However, with this kit, it seemed to be quite clunky and overall just kind of weird to play
with, and Daniel or Zenon, whatever you want to call him, is quoted as saying that the
gameplay of this version of his kit was just awful.
And so it was reworked again, until Riot would finally reach the kit that Azir now has today.
Some interesting concepts is that his E remained quite similar, and its possible that his new
passive takes inspiration from the obelisk ultimate idea.
As well, his Q and sand soldiers stayed in tact, and it’s not too hard to see the similarities
between his current kit, and the kit that Daniel Klein showcased on twitter.
Eventually Azir had his kit truly finalized, and he was put into the PBE, and I can honestly
say that he still remains one of the more unique and interesting champions that League
of Legends has to offer, with an incredibly complex kit, but it’s so cool to see how
far he’s come, and really, what azir could have been.
And that’s just about it!
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!