Hey guy’s it’s me Jeremy.
You guys know that after the break we’ve put a lot of time into increasing our production
quality, and part of that means exploring new directions for our content. That being
said, Scrapped Abilities has always been one of my absolute favorite series to make alongside
What Could Have Been, since it gives us the chance to explore the champion design process
and maybe pick up some hints about what abilities might turn up
in the game’s future. Hopefully you guys agree and enjoyed these two series too, and
by combining them with our new production standards we’ll hopefully be able to explore
them even further. We’ll be making sure to only cover abilities that we have never
covered in any previous video before, so without further ado let’s get into today’s
list of cancelled abilities that never made it into the game.
The first scrapped abilities on our list today are a couple of a neat little concepts that
were tested for Malphite’s tank rework. In the lore, Malphite is a literal mountain,
so Riot had decided to try push that design further and bring some abilities to the table
that would more accurately reflect him as a champion. One of the cooler ideas was to
give him an ability that actually turned him into a wall - he is after all a mountain,
so this ability would give him that feeling of being impassable terrain. Walls have been
pretty successful so far in the game, especially when it comes to Anivia and Taliyah, so adding
a terrain-based ability to a mountain champion would have been pretty clever design. Generally
speaking, wall abilities are made to zone out or separate enemy teams, but putting a
wall ability on an initiator like Malphite would have opened up some crazy teamplay with
champions like Vayne and Poppy who can take advantage of terrain to make some
really cool plays. Another scrapped ability for the Malphite rework was the idea of giving
him some kind of echoing earthquake - maybe like one big earthquake followed up by smaller
aftershocks. As a tank, his focus is on distraction and dealing AoE damage, so earthquakes would
have been a cool way to tie the ability into his lore, but despite the promise these abilities
showed, it just didn’t work out as expected. That being said, Riot have mentioned that
they might figure it out in the future, so don’t count this one out forever just yet!
Our next ability comes from early on in Rek’Sai’s development, and the idea was to give Rek’Sai
some form of stealth, similar to Evelynn. The burrowed form was pretty much already
locked in as the key to her design, so adding in a stealth feature to the burrow would have
been a cool way to add some contrast between Rek’Sai being burrowed vs unburrowed. Unfortunately
it became clear pretty quickly that tanky and relatively high damage initiators are
strong enough without having stealth added into the mix, so Riot had to seek out some
different solutions when it came to making burrowing feel cohesive. Tremor Sense ended
up being a pretty elegant fix that gave an interesting gameplay element to being burrowed,
while also keeping things a little bit more balanced for those on the receiving end of
Rek’Sai’s initiations - so we think Riot made a pretty good choice when it came to
scrapping the stealth.
Third on our list today is Kled, with an ability that is unlike anything else we’ve covered
before - because it was never actually intended to be on his final kit. Around the time that
the first iteration of Kled’s gameplay had been completed, it was clear that he wouldn’t
have an Ultimate, or at least a conventional one. That being said, champions undergoing
testing still need to be able to play and hold their own from level 1 right up till
level 18, so it wasn’t really possible to test Kled’s basic abilities without giving
him an Ultimate to help out. Alternatively they could have juiced up the numbers on his
Q W and E, but having those abilities being obviously overpowered would make testing kinda
pointless. Without an Ultimate, he would only really function in game until level 6, when
he would fall off a cliff in terms of effectiveness because everyone else would have an Ultimate
to use. As a result, Riot fitted him out with an exact copy/paste of Riven’s Ultimate
‘Blade of the Exile/Wind Slash,’ which gave Kled a fighting chance in game while
Riot tested out the rest of his kit. By the end of his development, it’s clear that
Riot had decided that he would need some kind of Ultimate regardless, but it’s only usable
while he’s mounted so he still ended up a little more limited in the UItimate department
when compared to most other champions.
The next ability comes from Katarina’s rework, and although we’re usually sad to see cool
scrapped abilities never make it into game, this one we are definitely glad to never have
to play against. The idea was to give Katarina a free-targeted Shunpo with a 1 second delay,
so it would function similarly to the initial cast of Elise’s Rappel. The catch was that
it would basically kill anyone in the target area once she actually arrived. That’s already
pretty obnoxious as an ability, but keep in mind at the time, they were re-designing Shunpo
with the resets in mind. That basically means if you were unfortunate enough to be caught
near her Shunpo, not only would you lose your life, but you’d allow her to keep chaining
them together and destroy your team too. It’s not strange for assassins to have movement
abilities that have the potential to deal good damage, but making it so she’s temporarily
untargetable and can reset the cooldown is just insane and would have had serious balance
issues in game.
Since we’re on the topic of super frustrating abilities, here’s one from LeBlanc’s rework
that drove the playtesters insane. While re-designing LeBlanc’s Ultimate, they tested out a Wukong
clone mechanic where enemies wouldn’t be able to tell whether she ulted or not. Instead,
after activating the Ultimate, LeBlanc would be replaced by a clone at the beginning of
the spellcast, and LeBlanc would be stealthed for a short time. Any single target damage
would pop the clone and reveal the true LeBlanc, but that basically meant people would react
to LeBlanc’s Ultimate only to discover it was the clone - and LeBlanc was still alive
and ready to blow them up. Riot MEMEMEMEME commented that at one point during a playtested,
they all heard Groovylord yell across the building “I DON’T KNOW WHAT'S REAL ANYMORE.”
I guess that’s one way to know when an ability is not going to work out!
Our last abilities for today both come from Taric’s rework, and they are all scrapped
ideas for his new Ultimate. Riot Repertoir was responding to a question asking whether
Cosmic Radiance was the first one they came up with for his new kit, and whether they
had any other concepts in mind before settling on it. Repertoir responded with a bunch of
different ideas that all sound equally badass. The first one was similar to his old targeted
stun, only it had extremely long range to push it up to the power level of an Ultimate.
Next up was something that sounds incredibly frustrating - a channeled resurrection. We
don’t know whether it was single or multi target, but the idea of letting Taric do a
channel and bring one or more of his allied champions back to life sounds incredibly powerful,
although it makes us wonder why Riot hasn’t tried anything like this before. The next
Ultimate concept was an offense/defense form swap, basically meaning that the new support
Taric would be able to focus on playing as a kind of tanky-enchanter, or more of a frontline
initiator. That’s actually pretty cool for a champion like Taric who fits both those
roles, but it was probably rejected for being a bit unfun compared to some of his more dazzling
Ultimate concepts. The last idea for his Ultimate was a twist on Ahri’s Charm - instead of
being a single target skillshot, it would be a player-based area of effect. So essentially
once Taric triggered his ultimate, everyone in an area around him would be so captivated
by his fabulous aura that they would be taunted towards him, in a similar way to Galio’s
old ultimate but without the channel. Unfortunately Riot had already spent most of their fabulous-budget
for Taric on his hair, so there was nothing left to fuel this idea for his Ultimate.