What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Bard is a champion that was designed around the idea of being a roaming support, similar
to how Alistar was a roaming support back in the season one meta.
And with that design came one of the most unique characters in League of Legends to
date, with voice lines consisting of only instruments and abilities that interact with
both allies and enemies, but before his release, Bard went through numerous redesigns and other
development cycles, so join me today in taking a look back at the time before his release
on March 12th, 2015, to see just what Bard could have been.
Here are some of my favorite comments, where I asked what you guys thought was the best
ability in league.
Today’s question is what is your favorite thing about Bard?
Anyways let’s get started.
The champion that would eventually become to be known as Bard began development in the
summer of 2013, when Riot Skeeziks began pitching some early concepts and ideas to the design
team, with the hopes of creating a champion from the folklore of the league of legends
universe.
And that idea for a character proved to be a good one, as Bard would take shape visually
in terms of art and how he looked quite early on in his development as a character, taking
inspiration from the Hayao Miyazaki films, which are great films by the way.
However, his personality and lore, and especially his gameplay weren’t so quick to come to
life.
Bard’s original concepts intended him to be a champion much more focused on music,
both playing music and involving it in his abilities.
This is where the name Bard eventually would come from, in the first designs of his kit,
Bard was, well a bard.
He had a musical theme going for him, and an instrument that was much more central to
his abilities, kind of similar to Sona.
He was going to be a part of a single faction, but eventually it would be decided that it
would make more sense for him to be somewhat of an omnipotent being, void of any allegiance
to factions in runeterra, so that his character could exist in lore throughout the world,
as a caretaker to protect relics and places scattered throughout.
Although the decision to make him speak through musical energy was determined early on in
his design, and was maintained throught his development.
The variations of the original version of bard, the musical version I guess you could
say, involved a bunch of different kits and abilities.
The first variation of Bard, involved gameplay that was intended to be like a support for
assassin players.
He was a close-range trickster, with a long-lasting stealth that he had to channel to enter, and
a directional knockback.
He could clear the ward from his lane brush, and then zone out the enemy team.
The idea being that if you ever lost sight of Bard, he would channel his stealth and
just be gone, and with that came the pressure of his invisible presence.
However, this first variation had a bunch of gameplay problems, and didn’t fit Bard’s
theme of being a musicial very well, so it was scrapped completely.
As for some of the more musical abilities that we attempted involved things such as
a three charge single target skillshot that applied a stun on the final shot if you fired
all 3 shots to a beat that was playing.
This ability proved to be a lot of fun to mess around with, but was restrictive and
limiting to use during actual gameplay.
Another version involved a Guitar hero style ultimate, matching visual effects to a beat.
But again, this ability sounded cool, but didn’t actually work out that well in gameplay.
However, Riot Meddler, lead champion designer, expressed the idea that a more subtle version
of that kind of ability has some potential to work.
As well, a different version of Bard’s musical kit that was tested had a passive that dropped
a lay waste style effect under targets that Bard hit with an auto attack, with the effect
detonating after a certain number of beats, similar to how Karthus’s Lay waste detonates
after a short delay.
This was the most promising and likely to be successful version of his musical kit,
and Riot meddler is quoted for saying that it wouldn’t surprise him if some variant
of that ability eventually ended up on the future kit of a champion.
And the last version that was tested during the time when Bard was designed as a musician
involved a giant wave of slow moving sound that gradually moved across the map, silencing
enemies while they were in within it.
It had a width of around 1200 units, and moved at a speed of around 600 units per second,
almost kind of like Nami’s ultimate, but this spell would take about 5 seconds to reach
the average team fight, since it came from your nexus, with the idea being that Bard
was making the Nexus crystal resonate to emit a powerful tone.
This ability looked awesome, but felt really random given how far in advance you had to
cast it, which of course isn't really good gameplay for a silence which is a reactive
effect.
Meddler commented on this ability, saying that a slow moving wave from one side of the
map to the other's still has some promise, and he could imagine them revisiting that
ability someday with a different effect on it on a different champ as well.
The musical versions of his kit, although they were pretty cool, would prove to be a
lot better on paper than in actual practice, and a lot of the variations of his kit felt
restrictive of clunky to play with.
Bard would go on to get iceboxed for a brief period of time until eventually they would
decide to transform Bard from a musical Bard into more of a cosmetic being, and the design
concepts of his abilities would change drastically.
Riot wanted Bard to fit the idea of being an otherworldly celestial being, so a big
part of bringing that character to life, was to have a voice over contain no actual spoken
words, being made only with instuments.
Early versions of his voice over prototypes involved instruments such as the bassoon,
contrabassoon, and the bass clarinet.
They also experimented and messed around with sounds from loads of other things, like the
Tibetan instruments, and various versions of the trombone and symbals, as well as various
ethnic flutes and reed instruments.
Eventually in the final version of his voice over, they used 4 different things to bring
it all together and give Bard a sense of other-worldliness.
The Alpenhorn, some Egyptian flutes, a verbed out piano tone of clusters and strings, and
a synthesizer called Zebra, which they programmed to cycle through the harmonic or overtone
series.
Although his musical theme remains a tiny bit in the form of a flute-like weapon, and
a musical voice over, his kit would be changed to have little interaction with music.
There was an earlier iteration of his concept where Bard was much more obsessed with wandering
and roaming than he is now, and that design inspired his current collection passive involving
meeps.
The roaming support concept remained true, and eventually Bard’s kit was designed and
finalized, and he was put into the PBE, and I can honestly say that Bard has one of the
most interesting and unique gameplay designs of any champion in League of Legends, with
an incredibly fun kit, and awesome personality, and it’s incredible to see how far he’s
come, and really just what Bard could have been.
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if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!