What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Kindred is a marksman champion that was released October 14th, 2015.
They were designed to fill this unique role of being an ad carry that performed exceptionally
well in the Jungle, and for the most part they do accomplish a lot of what their design
set out to do, and they’ve become a pretty cool champion.
But, it took a lot to get Kindred to what they eventually became, so join me today in
taking a look back at their development, to find out what kindred could have been.
If you guys enjoy the video don’t forget to hit that like button and if you don’t
enjoy the video hit that dislike, because if this video gets 10,000 ratings I’m gonna
buy myself some Chinese food.
Anyway, let’s get started.
Kindred as a champion started out when designer Jordan Anton aka Riot Wrecks, who also designed
Braum, set out to accomplish his big design fantasy.
Ever since he joined riot’s champion design team he really wanted to design a marksman,
he is an ad carry main after all, and so after he finished developing Braum, he immediately
requested the spot for the next marksman in the design cycle, and he set out to make that
dream come to life.
This happened around sometime in late 2013, a while before braum was actually released.
Jordan started with this idea of trying to create a marksman that was just really different
and unique, so that the character could bring something, some element of gameplay to league
of legends that didn’t exist there previously, and he thought of this idea of, hey what if
instead of having an ad carry that was a target taker, we have a target chooser.
Most ad carries in the game just kind of hit what is in front of them and they have to
deal with that and just hit whoever is the safest person for them to hit to put damage
on and put out as much dps on any target for as long as possible.
And he really liked this idea of an ad carry that could pick the target they wanted to
kill, rather than just having to attack whatever they could to not put them in risk of danger,
and he thought that target selection on an ad carry would be really fun.
And going off of that idea he started working on sort of a bounty hunter passive, of like
hey this is who Im tryna kill, but then you get a large amount of bonus gold for killing
that specific target.
It was a lot more of a literal bounty hunter passive in the sense that the reward for killing
that target you selected was just a whole bunch of gold straight up.
And he saw that hey you know we have all of these ad carries going bottom lane, but a
bounty hunter passive isn’t really that cool on a bottom laner, since you would only
ever target the ad carry or the support.
Meanwhile a jungler has much more free time to roam around the map and engage enemies
at will and a jungler can pick and choose any target in a sense.
So that resulted in him decided on making a marksman jungler with a bounty hunter passive.
And after that, he had enough direction to start to pick the character and personality
to go along with that gameplay concept.
But that character, was not kindred, in fact it was far from it.
The character that would eventually become known as kindred started out as a cyborg cowboy
sniper bounty hunter, who went by the name of well, cyborg cowboy during development.
This cyborg cowboy was the take on the kind of character that could fill the role of a
bounty hunter.
He was really tall and skinny, very robot-like, and had this huge sniper rifle that he could
use to pick off targets at a crazy distance.
And I’m sure you’re noticing that this guy looks pretty damn similar to jhin, but
that’s a story for a little bit later down the timeline of this development.
Anyway, they liked this western robot kind of bounty hunter character a lot, and so they
went with that theme and started to build a kit around it.
They experimented with a couple of different designs with gameplay for the cyborg cowboy,
and I’m really excited for this one because I actually got the chance to talk to Riot
Wrecks, the actual designer who worked on this very champion a couple of questions during
a Q&A about the very early gameplay kits that existed.
The first ability that was designed after the bounty hunter passive, was the W.
This ability started from the idea of putting down this zone on the ground that you were
really strong when fighting inside of it.
And at that point inside of the W zone the champion became literally just vayne, with
kindred passive instead of vayne’s passive, and they put the W in of this zone that gave
a massive combat buff, but they weren’t sure if the character would still work without
the silver bolts type of ability, so they just left it in the kit on top of this huge
zone that gave a massive combat buff, and that was the story of apparently the most
broken playtest ever, according to riot wreckz.
The kit with this W became insanely overloaded, and so the ability was scrapped, or I guess
reworked a bit into the current W that kindred has today.
As well, one of the more interesting ones definitely has to be the very first version
of the ultimate that existed on the cyborg cowboy.
The original ultimate was this put their name on a bullet kind of thing that fired a skillshot
with a fairly small hitbox, comparable to say like jhin’s w or something, and if it
hit the target you marked with your bounty hunter passive, or anyone else who was below
25% health, it would kill them instantly, regardless of resistances or anything, they
just die instantly if they meet either of those two circumstances and get hit by it.
The only thing that could save you was like a kayle ultimate kind of ability.
It didn’t matter if you had 10 million hp in shields or whatever, if you are able to
trigger the conditions, you exploded into this giant mass with a huge animation.
The skillshot worked kind of like a lux ultimate, in that it had an indicator with a delay and
then would hit instantly with no projectile.
And to top it all off, the ability was actually global.
But just to reiterate it was a skillshot with a seriously thin range, and it also had a
huge channel time before actually firing the ability as like this wind up of putting the
gun together, so the idea behind this ultimate was that you would try to fire it into the
fog of war and hit someone, and it was meant to create like this mind game of hitting someone
without actually seeing them, and they know you’re about to cast it, and youre trying
to land it, so where are they gonna go and where are you gonna fire it.
And that sounds crazy because of the whole insta death part going on, but it was actually
scrapped because it was actually a pretty useless ability.
This ultimate happened to be incredibly underpowered in the version they wanted to use.
They did try making it a bit more reliable to land, at which point it became broken beyond
all belief, so it was scrapped a bit.
Eventually after going through a few more iterations and designs they realized that
the design that they liked for gameplay had reached so far from the actual original concept,
that they scrapped the idea of the cyborg cowboy sniper.
That cowboy would eventually become high noon jhin, and although jhin was changed a lot
from the idea of being a bounty hunter, high noon jhin, the skin, is almost identical actually
to the very first ever conception for kindred.
And that first iteration of the ultimate I mentioned earlier became the inspiration for
Jhin’s curtain call ultimate later on.
At this point in the design they knew for sure that they wanted Kindred to be a jungler,
and they liked the idea for the design behind this bounty hunter passive.
However, the version that just gave bonus gold for killing the target wasn’t the coolest
possible version of that kind of passive, so they rebooted the character entirely around
the passive, and said okay, we know this character is going to be roaming around, we know they
are going to mark targets they want to go for, what’s the most awesome version we
can make of that?
And they came up with the idea of doing like this yin and yang two faces of death sort
of character, because it gave them a lot more room to make the reward for killing a target
that had been selected a lot more satisfying, to make it more than just gold.And they came
across this sketch from Riot Skeeziks that piqued their interest.
In this concept art, you had this glowing ethereal lamb that fired a shadowy wolf from
its bow as an attack.
This version of kindred from the concept artist actually fired wolf itself as a projectile
as it’s attacks kind of similar to how the current kindred w makes wolf attack a target,
so imagine that part of the w but as the actual basic attack.
They really liked this theme of the life and death balance kind of shpiel going on, and
that idea of being kind of like this incredibly neutral reaper of death fit in well with the
revamped bounty hunter passive.
They became these omnipresent bringers of death who arrived in the final moments of
someone’s life.
Whether the target ran from or accepted their fate determined how peaceful (lamb) or how
violent (wolf) their death would be.
Kindred became essentially the league of legends grim reaper and they liked that character
quite a lot and decided to stick with it, and build upon that theme.
At the start, those two sides were a lot more contrasted from what they are now.
Wolf was a lot darker, and lamb was a lot brighter, and a huge light would emenate from
lamb’s bow.
However, the intense contrast was a bit too hard on the eyes and lamb was way too bright.
Eventually they came up with the concept of each individual half wearing the mask of the
other half, lamb wearing wolf’s mask, and wolf wearing lamb’s mask, and at that point
everything clicked and they knew this was the character they wanted to go with for kindred,
where although both sides are separate and are essentially complete opposites, the two
of them combine and work together to form one elegant whole.
Kindred’s abilities started to get pieced together here and there from bits and patches
of their earlier designs, like their W became a toned down version of their original W,
but a few of their other abilities took a few tries to get right.
Her E started out as what is actually their joke animation now, where lamb shot her bow
down at her feet, but upon further iterations they decided they wanted to bring wolf into
her kit a little bit more instead.
As well, With the bounty hunter passive, they needed some aspect to contradict that and
represent the “life” side of things, so they came up with kindreds ultimate.
After they retired the bounty hunter theme kindred’s first ultimate was essentially
the ultimate they have now, however it had a range of 2000 units, which is huge, almost
semi global, with the idea that it would effect literally everyone within a teamfight, and
they really wanted this like western kind of stand off effect almost, where you wait
until the last moment, the ultimate expires, and boom everyone has this like Mexican stand
off, where you have 10 people almost dead, it ends and then its kinda like “draw”
“fire” kind of battle that happens, where everyone dies really fast and explosively.
Overtime it shrunk down gradually to isolate the good gameplay and make it a lot more interactive
with the opponents and the decision of choosing to stay in or leave the zone, and it reached
the version it is now.
And with that and a few minor tweaks here and there, Kindred’s design was fully complete,
character, personality, gameplay, and all.
Kindred is definitely one of the more unique champions in league of legends in the sense
that they really brought this ad carry jungler style to league of legends that hadn’t really
existed, or at least hadn’t been designed for previously.
They’ve proved to be quite successful in pulling off that gameplay concept, and I for
one am really fond of the way their character turned out.
Although they may have had some balance issues, there’s no denying that Kindred is incredibly
unique, and the personality and character they carry is incredibly mysterious, interesting,
and really just cool.
Although a lot of the iterations they went through were really awesome, I can’t deny
that kindred became an awesome champion.