At the beginning of the year,
there were a bunch of things that kind of like all happened at the same time
in a way that kind of forced us to reckon
with the fact that players had been feeling underserved for a while.
There were some themes that were coming through really clearly.
Some of that was that we hadn't been delivering enough
in some regards for them. That was really clear.
And that one of those regards was different ways to play League.
And that put further, I think urgency on us to accelerate
a bunch of the game mode work we'd already been exploring.
At the very beginning we were trying to say,
"Hey, what does a kind of a lower stress League of Legends experience look like?”
I took a few weeks to a month
at the end of last year to just make the prototype.
That was just me
sitting in a room coding for a while just to make the thing function.
And that was just you spawning with eight people and you're put on a team
and you fight and there's a life bar and that's all it was.
We had questions coming in around like,
"Okay, well, when do you guys want to ship it?
When do you guys want it to be done?"
We were like we think we could do it by the end of 2023.
And they're like, "That's cool. Can you do it for summer?"
And I was like, no.
And then they were like, "What if we did it for Soul Fighter?"
And I was like... That's still summer. (That's still summer!)
And then they're like, "Try." Alright, fine, we’ll try.
At that point in time
we had also recently gotten hacked,
which really affected our ability to be able to deliver quickly.
So it was a pretty stressful period.
I was definitely pretty stressed out and couldn't sleep for like a couple of days.
It just put a lot of pressure on us as a team.
From conception, six months is a very short amount of time for a mode.
The question was, can we make it work?
So at that point it was pretty obvious, it was like, okay,
well we're gonna need help to do it because it was really important for Riot,
and I think really important for players
like they haven't gotten a new mode in a while.
We were excited about being able to try to directly
respond to a lot of that player feedback because we felt we had it in us to do it.
Right, so we should get started.
I've added a few notes, things that I've observed.
If we can't get to it it's probably okay, but yeah, lets try.
We did get a lot
of help from leadership being able to green-light, saying that
right now Arena is a top priority across League PC.
And so that means some things like
grabbing a bunch of folks from the champion team, for example,
who had a lot of the needed skills
and having them jump over and help the modes team.
It also meant in some cases cutting back on a few of the features
we'd had planned for the original version of Arena,
when we're thinking we'd have a much longer timeframe.
A lot of those actually made it back in as the team found ways
to make things work.
It was not hard to get people excited
about the mode and to give people the thing that they wanted.
And really it was about getting the wake up call
at Season Start and understanding, "No, this is actually very important
and players really want this and the team can do
really, really good work when you give them the opportunity."
It quickly gained a lot of momentum, like a lot of momentum,
more than most things I've seen while working here at Riot.
And so just watching peoples' ears perk up and be like, "Hey, have you seen that?
That's pretty cool."
For me, I was like, "Oh yeah, no, we got to go full steam on this.
Please let me work on that. That sounds super exciting."
So in some ways, the
summer timeline kind of liberated us from the pressures of perfection
and allowed us to be a little more experimental
and try stuff that we thought might be cool.
But at the end of the day, it's like it's still not enough, right?
We don't want to just make a thing that people are like, "Oh, that was cool."
And then stop playing it.
I really wanted to try and make a mode that had legs.
So taking this giant roster of champions who have all of these different strengths
and weaknesses and saying, okay, actually what you're going to do
is just fight in a small circle. Go... who's the best?
You'll quickly get a lot of striation there, though many champions
will jump out at the top as like much better than many other champions.
And so we attacked this issue and trying to balance the mode across
all of these different champions in a couple of different ways.
Augments are something that we cribbed from TFT
and by adding
in this kind of random element to it, it helps equalize the skill level
a little bit of like, "Hey, if I get the right augment
and I build better around my augments, then I can beat somebody else
who might technically be a more competent League of Legends player."
There's cool builds and scalings and things that you can do that
that helps equalize the team.
I think this is the part that I'm most excited about
to see what are the wacky combinations that people are
being able to do with champions and Augments and items?
There will be a chance in your combat for a Soul Fighter
to make a cameo. For like Sett to jump in or Lux to jump in or whatever.
And these cameos will influence the battle by adding like new strategic elements.
So Lux will kind of scan around
the arena and ult people who cross her laser's path and
Gwen shows up and will shroud champions
and protect them from projectiles.
I think our first cameo was Sett
and seeing Sett just smash people on a map,
it's like, okay, I'm very annoyed that Sett killed me,
but it was really lending a lot of the credence to our original design
thinking on, hey, you know, we're creating this compelling experience.
If I lose, it's not that bad.
The mode requires a difference in perspective.
Like we want this to be a mode where it's okay to fail.
The reason why the teams are two-person sized is
we wanted as many champions to be playable as we could.
A lot of champion kits don't work in a 1v1 situation.
Like enchanters, they need an ally to buff up.
A lot of their power budget comes from supporting somebody else.
2v2 creates a situation where you can play a support and an AD carry.
You could try like two supports and make it work with the augments.
With a mind towards class balance,
we were able to introduce mechanics here that changed up the fight from round to round
in ways that gave those champions who weren't just great at face-mash,
fighting with each other in the small circle ways to win as well.
There are pretty fundamental differences between Arena and Summoner's Rift.
In Summoner's Rift
there's often a kind of defender's advantage where
even if you're getting chased down, eventually you'll make it to a turret
or some other defensive zone, your teammate or something
where we really need to empower the aggressor if we want stuff to happen.
But in Arena, it's sort of the opposite.
The whole game is pushing you towards the center, closer and closer together.
And so action will happen.
There's no way to avoid it.
We knew that we had a ring of fire that was going
to start closing in on the map as the round went on.
We specifically designed the center of each map to be a different shape.
So on one, there may be like a walkaround with a brush in the middle,
and that means that everybody
is trying to get into that brush and fight over that specific brush.
On another map, there's a river in the middle
and it essentially blocks off that same middle zone into
three separate zones.
One of the innovations that we've done on this mode is we've actually introduced
a new terrain type to League, what we're ultimately calling deep water.
And the idea is that it's impassable,
but you can see over it.
A ranged player wants to keep you out at their auto attack distance, right?
That's their zone of maximum power. And a melee champion,
similarly, their zone of power is when they are up close.
So the deep water basically helps
with that problem because it now provides protection for the ranged character
without obstructing their auto attacks or their abilities.
And because of that, they have the ability to now essentially kite
on the other side in a way that they haven't been able to before.
Getting kind of that
combo of augments, maps and cameos in
and starting to see the pieces come together during our playtests,
finding ourselves kind of just yelling during our playtests
because we're having fun.
That's when it really came together.
Whoa, whoa. Here. Oh, my God.
Oh, wow.
It was definitely at this really cool moment of like, "Oh, God,
I have to do this whole mode by summer?" to "Oh, no, we're going to do
this whole mode by summer."
And, you know, all of these cool artists
and UX designers and engineers and like,
just so many people pulled together to make this thing work
that it's just a huge point of pride in the League team.
It's a team that is very, very hungry to make things that players will love.
We want to give the players something that they've been wanting for a while.
I'm really excited to see how players respond to it
because we've seen how much gameplay we've gotten out of it.
I hope that players don't want us to turn it off.
What I'm hoping for really is to listen to what players
like about this mode, what players don't like about this mode.
The best, best case scenario
is that we find an audience of people who are like,
"I really wanted to love League,
but I just wasn't clicking with the Summoner's Rift pattern of play.
And this is actually the thing."
Is that good?
You want, you want to try it?
I'll take a crack at it.
I'm punch drunk now. I don't give a ****.
All right.
- So, you... - And Erika, you put that in the video!
- So Dan, then Stash, then you got it. - Yeah.