What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Vi was released on December 19th 2012, after spending two long years moving from concept
to concept.
She started out very differently and would have been totally unrecognisable, at one point
she was even a capoeira fighter with robot legs rather than the iconic metal gauntlets
we are familiar with today.
It took a number of different takes on her appearance and backstory before a final concept
ready for production was born, so we did some digging and uncovered her history to make
today’s What Vi Could Have Been.
As always if you enjoy this video hit that like button and if you don’t hit that dislike,
and let’s get started.
Vi’s original concept was hugely different to how she is now, even in her name.
The initial concept at Riot was for a female fighter, possibly with a backstory as some
kind of spunky mechanic.
The team started to run into overlap issues with Shyvana, and couldn’t really find a
way to properly define her as a character.
The first big breakthrough happened around a year before her release, as the concept
team started exploring a female fighter with powerful metal gauntlets known at the time
as Ruby.
Right at the start she took form as this crazy girl with roller skates, barely wearing any
clothes.
She would roll around on her skates and had these cool late 90s Ani DiFranco style dreads,
definitely spunky but nothing like how we imagine Vi today.
Riot kinda struggled to make this ‘Ruby’ character compelling enough to move her into
production, but what they knew for sure is that they had stumbled upon the core focus
for making their new bruiser a reality - a female badass with high tech gauntlets.
Ruby soon took on a new angle, losing her notorious dreads and skates and putting all
the design focus in those gauntlets.
Honestly, if it weren’t for her fists, you could believe this was a concept for a female
Ekko - small in stature but cool and streetwise.
It was a step closer towards her final concept, but something was still missing.
It didn’t properly capture who she was as a person and get the design team fired up,
so it was back to the drawing board.
Around 7 months before her release a fresh approach came in the form of a new concept
art from artist Zeronis, taking her in a new punk direction and giving her a fresh backstory
as an ex-criminal turned badass cop.
The steampunk feel was taken a step further too, straying away from the barely clothed
old prototypes and giving her a full suit of armor plating to wear.
Everyone on the champion design team immediately jumped on this as the perfect way to make
the ‘girl with gauntlets’ concept work, and it was dubbed ‘Enforcer.’
It was around this time that Riot GypsyLord joined the team and got started on the gameplay
part of development for Enforcer, after begging Lead Champion Designer Ziegler to let him
take it on as his first ever project.
The theme was laid out for him - a punky girl who solves her issues by punching anything,
usually faces.
Her backstory as a criminal described her as using her gauntlets to break into bank
vaults, which really set the wheels turning in GypsyLord’s head as to how to really
capture that feeling in her gameplay.
It was a 6 month ride from this point to Vi’s release, starting with GypsyLord’s main
design goals after hearing her concept.
He described them as firstly ‘big awesome punches,’ and secondly a focus on offense
as the best kind of defense, which really suited the concept art’s super aggro feel.
This is something Riot refers to as a power archetype - it’s about what a player sees
when they look at a champion’s splash, and how they think that character should feel.
For an armored punk girl with huge gauntlets made to smash things, her abilities should
feel really impactful to deliver on that archetype and give a really satisfying gameplay experience.
The last aspect GypsyLord settled on was that Enforcer should always be going IN.
Not kiting around, not jumping in and out of a fight, just getting stuck in the middle
of it.
With those aspects in hand, he started to draft what’s called a paper kit, which is
essentially just a list of theoretical abilities that suit the concept.
It’s pretty cool because some of these designs actually survived to find their place in her
finished kit.
Starting off she had the Passive, Denting Blows, one of the two parts that survived
till production.
Originally it gave her next attack after each spell cast bonus damage, along with shredding
her target’s armor, kinda like an homage to her backstory - after all if she can bust
through walls, she should be able to bust through armor too.
The other ability that was there from day one was her Q, Vault Breaker.
It used to cause Enforcer to root herself, charging up her gauntlets over 2 seconds before
dashing forwards, dealing tons of damage and knocking back the first champion hit.
This spell was the first ability that truly felt perfect for what later became Vi.
It ticked all the right boxes - it worked with her focus of going in, it felt impactful
and it even lined up really well with her backstory.
It was an all around win, and served as an example of how the rest of Vi’s finished
kit should look.
At the time her W was called Come At Me, featuring a spell shield that reflects back the first
spell to hit her, kinda like Fiora’s Riposte.
Enforcer’s first E ability was called Crush, causing her to clap her gauntlets together
on a nearby target, dealing damage and slowing them.
It had a bonus mechanic too - if it killed the target, it would ‘gib’ them and deal
Crush’s damage and slow in an AoE along with refreshing the cooldown.
Pretty cool mechanic, but the really interesting part of this initial Vi design was her Ultimate,
Steampunk Assault.
Her first Ult on paper was actually 3 spells in one.
The idea was that she’d use her Ultimate to dash towards a nearby enemy in a similar
way to Xin Zhao’s Audacious Charge, but then she’d suppress them for a second.
She could then recast Steampunk Assault, which would replace her QWE abilities with bonus
effects for her Ultimate.
GypsyLord’s idea was that it would work kinda like a Street Fighter combo, giving
her control over what to do with the suppressed target.
While using Steampunk Assault, her Q became Beatdown and using it would extend the suppression
duration and deal bonus damage.
Her W would became Slam, knocking the target up into the air and slamming it back down
in the ground, stunning all enemies.
Her E turned into Throw, which would literally grab and chuck an enemy in a chosen direction.
It was a pretty sweet idea, but one of the big problems is that because of the long Ultimate
cooldown, you don’t get that many chances to use each of the options.
This could easily get players of sticking into a habit of picking ‘the best’ and
not really using the rest of them.
The first kit did go through some playtesting but most testers reported that it didn’t
feel the way that Enforcer’s abilities should.
The spells were all pretty cool in their own right, but they didn’t really do her character
justice, with the exception of Vault Breaker.
Vault Breaker alone is mentioned to be the one super well received ability, causing GypsyLord
to take a step back and think about why that ability worked so great for her while the
rest of her kit just didn’t.
Enforcer as a character had this awesome aggressive feel, and abilities like Come At Me were purely
defensive and didn’t really capture that properly - she’d be baiting out enemy shots
rather than just smashing them first and asking questions later.
GypsyLord spent a few months brewing ideas, and Vi as a champion really started to come
together as he tried to pin her visceral feel down.
He decided the best way to make her feel punchy was simply to set a rule on what he designed
- every spell should be describable by ‘something’ punch, using his perfected Vault Breaker ability
as a template.
He settled on his punch for every ability - Vault Breaker being Vi’s own personal
Falcon Punch, Denting Punch for her new aggressive armor shredding passive W, Explosive Punch
for a new powerful autoattack reset and waveclear tool, and ‘Kill The Carry’ Punch for her
Ultimate, with the idea that it’d do exactly what it says on the tin.
Two main playstyles seemed to emerge for Vi, based on what her kit could do.
One was described as the ‘Talon style’ where Vi would run in, blow her cooldowns
then run out again.
The other was known as ‘Shyvana Style’ where she would run in, use her cooldowns,
then keep fighting until the target was dead or she needed to run to survive.
Her Denting Punch was the big deciding factor on how these play patterns would work for
Vi.
The first version of it was a 5 hit passive, but it felt kinda unsatisfying because the
target would probably be dead by that point anyway, and it gave the enemy a lot of time
to escape the trigger.
It was changed to a 3 hit to fix that issue, but then the ability ended up in this Talon
vs Shyvana play style rut.
If it had too much power, Vi would be almost Assassin-like, able to get in, do a full combo
including one W trigger then the target is dead.
At the same time, GypsyLord didn’t want that ability to be weaker because it would
end up feeling like a wasted ability again.
He found his solution by giving her an attack speed buff on top of the damage and armor
shredding.
That way she wouldn’t blow up a target, and it gave her a real reason to stick around
and brawl for longer, aiming to trigger her W a second time.
It pushed her towards the Shyvana play pattern, which was decided to be the healthier place
for Vi to be overall, as well as properly matching her personality as someone that should
really just be hitting people all the time - cooldowns or no cooldowns.
Her finished passive Blast Shield was a really cool invention because it allows her to stay
healthy and gives her a sense of sustain, but without making her reliant on a defensive
ability, which would feel pretty unlike Vi.
Linking it so closely to her activatable abilities made sure that her focus was on aggression,
and it actually helped make her quite accessible to new players because they could play her
well without worrying too much about it - after all, if you use your Vault Breaker to jump
on top of someone, you are gonna take some damage, and the passive helps soften the blow
a little.
Vi’s finished W, Denting Blows, is her only ability that won’t trigger her passive.
This was actually a design decision, aimed to give the player more control over how to
use her passive.
A lot of Vi’s will just want their free passive, but because you can auto attack and
trigger your W without using your passive, it does give you more control over when to
use it in an extended fight.
The only part of Vi’s kit that didn’t remain the same from GypsyLord’s second
attempt at her full kit was her Ultimate.
The ‘Kill The Carry’ Punch was called Power Slam at the time, and it shared a lot
in common with her original Ultimate.
It dashed towards a nearby enemy and used what was basically the ‘Slam’ part of
her original Ultimate design, uppercutting them into the air and slamming them back into
the ground, stunning everything around them.
It removed the other two options and the suppress which would have rendered Warwick a bit pointless,
but it was still plagued with issues.
Every champion Ultimate should feel unique - and Power Slam was coming across as a bad
Malphite Ult, Unstoppable Force.
It had worse range, a smaller stun and was easier to avoid.
It also meant Vi had no big niche to fill, something to set her apart and make it worth
picking her over another champion.
As her kit was at this point, she filled a similar role to Xin and Jarvan, but there
wasn’t really any reason to pick her over those other choices, especially Jarvan who
has his impassable terrain.
Once again GypsyLord went back to the lab to discover Vi’s Ultimate, the one ability
that would set her apart and give her an identity of her own.
The solution was Assault and Battery.
Assault and Battery was the finishing touch to Vi’s kit, and it gave Vi an ability that
no one else in the game has.
A guaranteed knock up at quite a long range is no laughing matter, and it made sure that
no matter what, Vi would be able to reliably dive the backline.
More importantly, it fits in amazingly with her lore and personality, it feels like something
you could imagine Vi doing as she chased down a criminal in Piltover.
It’s rewarding to use, great for teamplay, and when you pick Vi in champion select you
know that no matter what, you’ll be able to CC a target once your Ultimate is off cooldown.
GypsyLord mentioned that when it came down to her Ult, he was concerned that although
great fun to use, the lack of counterplay made it feel kinda bad to play against and
he would probably look for another Ultimate if he could do it over again.
Still, we think he did a great job with it, especially for his first ever design project
at Riot.
Vi is an energetic character that wants to get in your face - and she doesn’t pull
any punches.
It took a while to lock down her appearance and backstory, once her niche was decided,
Riot GypsyLord managed to figure out a kit that perfectly captures everything that makes
Vi so damn cool.
As always we had a great time researching what Vi could have been, so make sure you
leave us your comments about who we should cover next.
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, thanks for watching, subscribe if you
want, and I’ll see you guys next time!