What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Gnar is a Fighter / Tank champion that was released on August 18th in 2014.
Gnar was designed by Riot Gypsylord who was assisted by Riot Meddler, and when he came
out he brought this unique playstyle of a transforming champion with the caveat that
you were not able to control when you transformed, unlike other shapeshifters.
He’s an awesome champion, but Gnar as is he is today wasn’t always the Gnar that
was going to be released.
He had the possibility to be a lot different to what he is now, so join me today in taking
a look back before his release, to find out what gnar could have been.
And I gotta say that this is another what could have been episode that I’m super excited
to present because I got the chance to talk to the riot gypsylord and ask him a bunch
of questions about Gnar’s design, so some, but not all of the info in this video is essentially
exclusive to me and this will be the first time the public hears about it, and big props
to our man riot gypsylord for being kind enough to share the information.
And if you guys enjoy the video hit that like button and if you don’t enjoy the video
his that dislike, since if this video hits 10,000 ratings I’m gonna buy myself.. uh..
actually, I’ll let you guys decide, whatever the top rated comment is, is what I’ll buy
if this video hits 10,000 like.
Within reason of course.
Aaaaand let’s get started.
Gnar’s development began with Riot Meddler asking him and the champion design team about
this concept of transforming champions.
They wanted to make a new transform champion that felt good to play as, but also to play
against.
At this point in time the transform champions in the game were either completely broken,
and as such were frustrating to play against, or were heavily underpowered, and as such
were not fun to play as, and a large part of that was due to the mechanics of the way
the transform was designed in those champions.
They realized that they wanted someone who would have identifiable strengths and weaknesses
in both forms.
And the reason why that didn’t exist in the other transform champions, was because
you were able to just switch forms at will, so if a champion had a meaningful weakness
in any given form, they could just switch to the other form and that weakness was gone
instantly.
So they came to the answer that they needed a transform champion that did not allow you
to decide when you switched forms, and that heavily limited concept of gameplay was what
they wanted to design around, and they went with that right from the start, and began
to work on the character surrounding that.
Gnar’s story began with him being almost like a hermit pilgrim.
He was constantly wandering the world and exploring all alone by himself as a young
yordle after being frozen in ice for thousands of years and waking up to this new world.
But he needed the tools to be able to survive the dangerous world on his own, so the idea
they came up with was like this man and monster style of transformation, akin to like Dr.Jekkl
and Hide, or Bruce Banner and the Hulk, where this innocent little creature would unwillingly
and unknowingly transform into a monstrous creature.
They explored a bunch of different mosters for him to turn into though.
In one of his original versions he turned into a more traditional dinosaur, similar
to like a t-rex, which is probably where the dino gnar skin was inspired from.
In other forms he transformed into a massive bear, and in another this huge angry ox.
Eventually they decided on the idea of more of like a gorilla-esque creature with a front
loaded body and enourmous muscles and stuff.
From there the team looked towards concept artists Edmundo Sanchez and Josh Singh, who
drafted up this piece of concept art based on the idea that they had for the character.
Based on that concept art, which the team liked, Riot designer Charles Liu developed
these iterations for his in game concepts, and the team began to work on developing a
kit around this version of gnar.
As you can see he uses a different weapon, and his color scheme is a lot more primate-esque
to go along with the idea they had of him being based off of the body type of a gorilla.
The main goal with Gnar’s gameplay was to have both forms be equally useful but in different
ways, with each form being strong in certain clear cut circumstances.
And with that concept they started by trying to make him a more accessible form swapping
champion, that was easy to pick up but difficult to master, as the existing transform champions
were considered difficult to learn for new players.
Right off the bat they were sure of a few things.
Gnar wouldn’t be able to use mana since his abilities couldn’t be gated by mana
when you already weren’t able to decide when to transform, so the rage mechanic was
the very first thing they worked on.
Originally, it generated rage a lot faster and more frequently, and then slower, and
it went through a lot of iterations until they got the feel for it in terms of laning
and teamfights.
So they had his rage mechanic, but in order to give his kit meaningful weaknesses and
ensure that he puts himself in danger when playing aggressive, they needed to give him
super short range.
So originally, gnar was actually a melee character.
This jawbone club weapon had a melee basic attack in both mini and mega gnar form, and
his auto attack in both forms did negligible damage with the trade off of making his abilities
a bit more powerful.
And as a result of being melee in both forms, in his mini form he was extremely fast and
had a boatload of movement speed as a way to be slippery and elusive.
However, although he had some poke and solid kiting ability, he performed poorly in skirmishes
since his auto attack was mostly useless regardless of which form he was in, and after seeing
that version, they knew it had to change.
That was the moment that truly cemented the concept of mini gnar being this sustained
damage with solid kiting form that was super squishy, while mega gnar was this high impact
brawly form that was slow and kitable.
With that design concept designs cemented, gnar developed into this idea where each form
had a much more concrete style and they figured out what his abilities would be a lot more,
the goal of him being easy to play became much more of a secondary goal and really just
not that important, since they realized that they had to make him a much more complex and
difficult champion if they wanted to accomplish their primary goal of limiting access to form
swapping to create distint and meaningful strengths and weaknesses in each form.
In order to accomplish that goal of accessability, they decided to make mini and mega gnar share
ability cooldowns, that way having 7 total abilities didn’t really feel as overwhelming
as the other transform champions, since you would only ever have access to 4 at a time.
And as well, they wanted to keep the abilities between the two forms mostly similar to make
him similar to play.
In a sense, Gnar’s Q would be a line skillshot regardless of his form, and his E would be
a ground targeted leap regardless of form.
And that mechanic really brought a lot of fluidity to Gnar’s kit and made the two
forms feel really connected to one another, and opened up a lot of build diversity for
him in terms of items.
The concept of sharing cooldowns between abilities, while also having the abilities behave in
similar ways, particularly the Q and E, was a big ‘aha’ moment in gnar’s design,
and was the big factor that made them finally decide that Gnar was going to be a sure thing
and would be brought to life.
Orginially, mini gnar had his own ultimate that was a separate ability from mega gnar’s
ultimate.
I don’t have the exact info on what that ultimate did, but it was likely a disengage
or kite tool that capture the mobile and agile playstyle of mini gnar.
However, they decided against it since Meddler felt that Mini Gnar and Mega Gnar having a
shared cooldown on the ultimate was counterintuitive since his ultimate was something that needed
to have access available on demand once you were in mega gnar, they didn’t want the
case of you having to wait out your mega gnar form to use the mini gnar ultimate.
They needed him to have an ultimate that would always have relevance, since his transform
time was already unreliable, they didn’t want to also make his ultimate unreliable
on top of that.
As well, Meddler decided that Mini Gnar didn’t need an ultimate to accomplish the goals that
they had for his playstyle, so it was taken off of his kit.
And at this point was when Gnar’s design passed from Riot Meddler to Riot Gypsylord.
Up until this point Riot Meddler had been the sole design leader for Gnar, but he passed
it over to work on Other projects.
And the first thing riot gypsylord did was change Gnar’s weapon from the jawbone club
into a boomerang, and gave him a ranged basic attack in the mini form.
By this point his character and story had been developed a bit further after changing
his weapon, and his model had been pretty much cemented in it’s design, but the gameplay
was still far from it, and still had a lot more to go through.
From there his ultimate was also changed to an ability that you guys might actually know
about, which went by the name of Devour.
This ultimate ability would eat an enemy champion for 3 seconds upon targeting them, and would
remove them from the world for 3 seconds.
During this time you wouldn’t be able to move, but you could spit out the devoured
enemy in any direction and deal a bunch of damage to them.
This ability didn’t work out for a few reasons.
Gypsylord described this devour ultimate for gnar as feeling a lot like a discounter skarner
ultimate or a discounter fiddlesticks fear, and as a result was unsatisfying to have as
an ultimate, especially since it made the opponent you devourer invincible for the duration.
As well, with the style that mega gnar’s form was deisnged to portray, this devour
mechanic was more along the lines of like a ravenous wolf, rather than like a rampaging
bull in a china shop kinda thing that they wanted.
Gnar needed to have an ultimate that would always have relevance and could have an immediate
impact when it was available, since his transform into mega gnar was already unreliable, so
it wasn’t clean to make his ultimate unreliable as well.
So, this ultimate was scrapped and after a few iterations was changed to the ultimate
he currently has now.
And as I’m sure you probably have predicted, this devour ability would get stolen from
gypsylord and meddler by Riot Zenon for Tahm Kench.
Zenon realized that on gnar’s kit this devour mechanic definitely had no place, in order
for the mechanic to work, they had to build the entire kit of the champion around it,
which is what he aimed for when designing tahm kench, but that’s a story for a different
video.
In addition, Gnar’s W also used to be a lot more like Varus’s W. It had a similar
effect of applying stacks upon hitting your auto attacks on a target, and then once you
stacked it up to 3 auto attacks, you would have to proc it using his boomerang, and then
you would get the bonus movement speed as well as the percent max health bonus magic
damage.
And that ability didn’t really work out because it was clunky and unsatisfying, so
they changed it to proc immediately, and to allow his other abilities to generate stacks
as well in addition to his auto attacks.
As well, another ability that went through a couple of road bumps during it’s design
was gnar’s hop ability, his E. They knew that he was going to have to have some form
of mobility, especially in his mini form right from the get go, so the concept for his E
was there right from the start, however, in one of the early versions of gnar’s kit,
his hop ability was a lot more hoppy than it is now, in the sense that it had an unlimited
amount of hops, as long as you were actually hitting targets, you could bounce 5, 10, 15,
50, 100 times if you had enough things to bounce off of in the direction you were hopping.
It was a lot of fun when it worked, but it felt super clunky since it was uncontrolled
and unpredictable, and really just super crazy and unfair to play against, so it was toned
down significantly to 1 bonus hop maximum.
And after figuring all of those things out, Gnar’s gameplay kit was fully fleshed out.
Gypsylord mentioned a bit about how Gnar had much less scrapped abilities compared to other
champions, but I’m glad I was able to showcase pretty much all of them, rather than just
the few major ones that were showcased to the public.
And with those designs worked out, and after a few minor numbers tweaks, his gameplay kit
had been fully completed to go along with his story, character, and personality.
And with that, Gnar became this champion who was incredibly unique in that for the first
time on any champion, you had to learn how to play during the transformations between
forms, as well as learning how to play around the two different playstyles that his individual
forms brought to the table.
His kit was unique, complex, and had a ton of depth, and fit in quite nicely thematically
with him being this prehistoric being that was almost out of place in this world, but
also accomplishing the monstrous beast and cute little goofball personalities simultaneously.
Gnar ended up becoming a pretty sweet champion, and although a lot of the versions he had
during development were super awesome, there’s not doubt that the design goals Riot Gypsylord
and Riot meddler had were quite successful, and Gnar was released to the public as an
awesome champion.
And that’s gonna be it for me today, if you guys enjoyed the video don’t forget
to hit that like button and if you didn’t hit that dislike, subscribe if you want more
videos like this one, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!