What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Lucian is a champion that was released on August 22nd, in 2013, and ever since he was
released and had some bug fixes he’s been a huge factor in the meta for AD carries,
and even now we are starting to see him played in solo lanes a bit here and there.
And Lucian ended up being a super fun ad carry, but he wasn’t always going to be the way
that he ended up.
As with every champion, Lucian went through a bunch of different development cycles and
redesigns, and so join me today in taking a look back through his development story,
to find out What Lucian Could Have Been!
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if this video hits 10,000 ratings I’m gonna buy myself some Tim Hortons.
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the video guys.
Lucian’s development began in mid-2012, and he was designed by Riot Zenon aka Daniel
Klein, although Zenon wasn’t the original designer, he eventually took ahold of the
project and managed a majority of the work.
His development began with an idea piece of concept art from Eoin Colgan that completed
in the summer of 2012.
Eoin is a concept artist who works on pieces for random characters to present to the champion
design team, and a lot of the time the characters stick out as just being super awesome, and
so a designer will then take the concept art piece and build a character off of that.
Eoin is responsible for the art from AAtrox, Draven, Fiora, Varus, and Zed, as well as
the Lucian piece.
This concept art had actually been leaked to the public in late 2012 or so, but it didn’t
really effect his development.
Anyway the designers loved the Lucian piece, and they had idea floating around about the
whole kind of concept of the characters from movies like the Matrix and Equilibrium, and
they loved the archetype of martial arts using weapons, and they wanted to create their own
version of the weapons that existed in those types of movies, and from the concept they
knew that he was going to be a very intesnse and dark personality, and with the gameplay
of dealing damage while moving.
They wanted an ad carry who would be swift, and involve a lot of movement and position
gameplay, as well as blasting people.
At the time they were focusing a lot around the shadow isles, and they wanted a character
who would directly oppose the characters from the Shadow Isles, and so they began to work
on the gameplay for the champion under the name of Lucian, the gun Templar, with the
idea that he was going to be released around the same time as Thresh, who was currently
being developed at the same time.
And Riot Zenon is quoted for saying that Lucian’s design concept was always the strongest aspect
of his design, so it didn’t really change all that much from it’s conception other
than some minor tweaks here and there, and the renaming of his title from the gun Templar
to the purifier, so once they had settled upon the concept for Lucian’s character
and personality, they began to work on his gameplay.
And throughout the initial design for Lucian’s gameplay, the designers had a really difficult
time capturing the personality and theme that Lucian needed in his gameplay.
On one hand the thematics of his design wanted this action packed kind of gameplay like the
action scenes from the movies, but they also wanted to capture a more auto attack focused
style to make the gameplay as a marksman a bit more unique and interesting, and the desginers
struggled a lot from their lack of direction to take the gameplay.
That was the main challenge that they faces, Lucian wasn’t a character that could just
have two guns, he needed to prove that there was an expert in martial arts behind the weapons.
And after a while, they had some version of Lucian that showed a bit of potential, but
a month before his release, the design team got together, and decided that Lucian just
wasn’t as fun to play as he needed to, and the gameplay didn’t really click the way
that it needed to to make Lucian a successful champion.
And so he was pulled from the launch schedule and would receive a massive delay, in order
to make the mechanic of dealing damage while moving fulfill the design fantasy for what
they wanted to accomplish.
And based on the idea that Lucian had been planned to release sometime around the time
that Thresh was, this delay for a complete redesign of Lucian’s gameplay would last
for about 7 additional months, on top of the time they had already spent developing him
up to that point.
And throughout both of those development cycles, Lucian had a ton of scrapped abilities that
never made it into his current design.
It’s not entirely clear which abilities lined up to which development cycle in the
timeline, but they did try a lot of different variations for his gameplay, and let’s run
through as many as we know about, starting with his passive.
Lucian had a total of three different passives during his development.
For a majority of his development, his original passive was that killing a unit would reset
his auto attack timer.
They really needed an ability that would accomplish the double gun kind of feeling, and that was
the design they started with for that, but it didn’t work very well, since resetting
your auto attack timer isn’t actually that fast, since you have to wait for the first
bullet to land to kill the unit to actually fire another one.
So this type of ability wouldn’t really feel like you had two guns, just that if you
killed a unit you maybe had a small boost in attack speed.
From there Riot Zenon talked to a bunch of other champion designers, and got a couple
of okay ideas, until he talked to Riot CertainlyT, who suggested the idea of giving each gun
it’s own independent auto attack timers.
And that design of the two guns working separately from one another, as well as the idea of having
two auto attack timers was one that Zenon really gravitated towards and tested out.
However, it proved to be quite ridiculous, and as a result it required Lucian to have
extremely low attack speed for this passive to actually be balanced, otherwise he was
just an ad carry with literally double attack speed for free, and so they had to give him
a huge hit to his attack speed and his attack speed scaling to actually make this ability
possible, and as a result it ended up feeling pretty clunky and bad, and just wrong for
the gameplay of being a swift and intense dual gun wielder.
As for the third passive that Lucian had during his development, we don’t know exactly what
it did, but Riot Zenon is quoted for saying that it turned League as we know it upside
down, so I imagine it was scrapped quite quickly, and he also mentioned that it just didn’t
fit the theme of the champion, and eventually they settled upon the double shot passive
that he has now to accomplish that two guns sort of feeling really well.
As for Lucian’s Q, during early playtests he had a lot of different abilities that featured
like a double skillshot kind of effect, that would shoot out two lasers in different directions.
And there were a lot of other strange double skillshots that were much more easier to dodge,
and although we don’t know the exact specifics for how these double skillshots worked, they
didn’t work out in his kit and they were fairly underpowered.
Although they fit really well thematically and were pretty cool, they just did not work
for his gameplay design, and when it comes to champions although they want the thematics
of abilities to be as awesome as possible, Riot designers believe sacrificing theme for
fun and better gameplay is always worth it if it’s actually necessary.
And as a result, during the playtests with that version of Lucian’s kit, he was really
missing a reliable source of consistent damage ability in his kit, and as well they felt
that he could really benefit from an ability that was almost like a trickshot kind of thing,
that was a bit different from missile based skillshots, in the sense that it’s still
aimed, but it doesn’t really act like a normal skillshot that you just shoot out.
And so they settled upon an ability that Riot Scarizard described as being a combination
of Miss Fortune’s Double up, and Sivir’s Richochet, and it really needed to be almost
impossible to dodge, otherwise it felt really frustrating to play with.
And eventually they began to really embrace the idea of Lucian using a target to aim his
laser, and then firing it regardless as kind of like a pseudo skillshot that was still
possible, albeit it difficult to dodge, it became much more fair to play against.
For his W we don’t have too much information, just that the star animation was how his ability
began.
One of the gameplay artists named Casey made a super badass star explosion thing and then
Riot Zenon made a skill to fit, and gave it some mobility and interaction elements to
fit well gameplay wise.
And for his E, unfortunately I don’t have anything so it’s likely that this ability
went through little to no iterations in terms of overall design, rather just some minor
mechanics tweaks here and there, although I can’t entirely be sure.
And now we are finally at his ultimate.
Lucian had a total of 5 different ultimates during his development that were scrapped,
and we have specific information on a few of them.
The first version of his ultimate was just a straight up buff that allowed him to move
and attack and cast all of his abilities at the same time, to literally allow him to deal
damage while moving.
It fit great with the whole theme they were going for, since it was just straight up giving
him what they wanted his theme to be, but it was pretty overpowered, and also incredibly
difficult to use, and so they knew that they wanted to keep the same thematic feel, but
they needed to use different mechanics to do so.
Another version of his ultimate was a targeted ability where you would target someone kind
of like Caitlyn’s ultimate, and then you would shoot out a missile at them that would
collide with the first enemy hit in any direction, but after 1 second the missile would turn
in a direction of the targeted opponent, like a homing missile kind of, and that missile
would rotate a maximum of 15 degrees every quarter of a second.
And once it finally was in a position that was a straight line towards the initial target,
it would accelerate but stop rotating altogether, and it would explode on impact dealing tons
of damage.
And this ability was designed to have the counterplay of being able to be dodged once
it reached the state where it was no longer rotating, so it was kind of like his Q in
that it was a targeted ability that was a dodgable skillshot, although it was probably
difficult to dodge due to the acceleration on it, and it was especially broken when you
had an ally to keep the enemy in place.
So it was like a homing missile kind of effect that you could curve around minions or around
the enemy tanks and frontliners.
This ultimate was super fun and awesome to use and play with, but it was really difficult
to make it both reliable for the Lucian player to land, and fair for the opponent to dodge
it at the same time, and in the end the ability didn’t make sense in Lucian’s gameplay
design, it was an ability much better fit for a mage type of champion, so maybe we’ll
see this version of Lucian’s scrapped ultimate on a future mage champion!
And so they took some inspiration from his Q of the idea of a missile based skillshot
that was something that you aimed, and settled upon the concept of an ultimate that was a
hail of bullets that he could cast while moving, which fit great thematically and gave him
a great way to deal damage while moving and give him that really slippery feel that he
needed in teamfights, but it took a couple of iterations to get to where it is now.
In one of the earlier versions of his kit, the one where I mentioned earlier where he
was missing a reliable damage source on his basic abilities, that version of his ultimate
was initially super overtuned to the point where in a fight it was dealing as much as
80% of his overall damage ability combo, and it would just shred people, it could kill
tanks by itself, and squishies even faster, and as a result his basic abilities were forced
to deal little to no damage to make his ultimate balanced, and of course having his 4 other
abilities feel useless was not fun at all, so his ultimate had to be toned down a lot
to make him more fun and fair.
There was also a version where he was able to recast the ultimate during it’s duration,
so you could change the angle of it after already casting it initially, and this wasn’t
entirely broken, since his ultimate was weaker as compensation, it was just really unhealthy,
since the counter play of being able to dodge his ultimate is really important to make the
ability fair, and adding a little bit of risk into the ultimate allowed them to make it
stronger and have a shorter cooldown, and eventually they settled upon the version of
the culling that is in the game today.
And as well another thing that happened with Lucian, is that during the majority of his
development, his particles looked very prismatic with way more colors than he currently has
now.
They were also super noisy, but it was a bit too similar to Lux’s animations, so they
limited the color scheme to the blues and yellows that he has now, and they felt that
it communicated his effects the same way, while also being more unique and visible.
And once all of his abilities and animations had been ironed out, Lucian would go on to
finally get released.
He’s probably my favorite ad carry in the game, at least in terms of how fun they are
to play, and although his alternate designs during his development were super cool, he
ended up being released as a super fun champion, and the designers really captured the gameplay
style that they were going for.
Anyway, looks like that’s it for me today, if you enjoyed the video drop a like, subscribe
if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!