What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Yasuo was released on December 13th in 2013, and was designed by Riot CertainlyT.
Now, CertainlyT might just be the most disliked champion designer at Riot, since he tends
to create a lot of imbalanced champions that people hate playing against, but I personally
am really fond of his champion design style.
He really tries all sorts of crazy abilities and whacky ideas on the off chance that they
might work, and Yasuo is one of the creations that came out of that style.
However, Yasuo wasn’t always going to end up in the way that he did, and he went through
a ton of different iterations and versions that could have made it to the live release.
So join me today in taking a look back through Yasuo’s development cycle to find out, what
Yasuo could have been.
And if you guys enjoy the video hit that like button and if you don’t hit that dislike
because if this video hits 10,000 ratings, you guys know what’s up by now, I’m buying
myself a pizza.
Anyway, let’s get started.
Yasuo’s development story began with the theme for his character.
CertainlyT had this concept that he wanted to bring to life of a character that would
be a more traditional and serious swordsman.
He liked Master Yi a lot, but felt that there was room in the game for a different kind
of swordsman.
And he stumbled upon this idea of capturing this tone of the type of guy from a classic
samurai movie, where the samurai is just so melancholic and brutal and dark.
The kind of guy that faces a bunch of enemies and comes out drenched in blood, and who fights
not because he wants to but because it’s his duty.
And that was the design fantasy that Yasuo began with.
And after they had the initial idea, they would go on to expand quite a bit on that
concept, and in fleshing out that idea about a samurai swordsman type, they broke it down
into 3 parts that they felt captured the personality of the combat style well.
Those parts ended up being dash, parry, and strike.
From there it was obvious that Yasuo’s abilities in his gameplay would have to capture the
feel and essence of those three elements.
After that, Yasuo’s character was actually quite fleshed out.
Since his design started with his theme, they already knew the core of his character and
personality, so it didn’t really go through many iterations as the designers kind of knew
what they wanted from the start.
However, his actual gameplay kit is a much different story, as the vast majority of Yasuo’s
development time was spent developing his gameplay and making it work, and as a result
it went through a massive number of changes.
This development began with Yasuo’s Dash and Strike abilities.
One of the first variations of Yasuo’s Dash that was playtested was put on his ultimate.
This old ultimate was a dash that would be a line skillshot that stunned and damaged
all enemies hit.
It was kind of like how a samurai in a movie would do this super epic and fast dash past
an enemy where they unsheath their sword and everyone in the way gets chopped in half.
It was definitely a super cool concept for an ultimate, and it did an awesome job of
capturing the intense samurai feel they were trying to go with, but eventually they decided
that they didn’t want his dash to be an ultimate, because that made his dash feel
as if it wasn’t a core part of his kit.
And from there, that version of the dash was toned down a lot to be super short ranged,
and they wanted it to feel elegant and more intense, so they came up with the idea of
being able to use it on minions and dash all over the place, and the team decided that
that version of the dash was actually super fun to use, so they kept it and after a few
minor tweaks and stuff, it would become his E. At this point, they realized that in order
for him to feel good to play, his ultimate would have to be a separate effect outside
of the dash, parry, and strike elements, since those three things were core to bringing Yasuo’s
personality to life through his gameplay.
Instead, they decided they wanted to give him some kind of super synergy with his teammates,
because a lot of melee carries in the game kind of lacked synergy, and that was an interesting
gameplay element they wanted to explore.
And as a result, they settled upon the idea of an ultimate that complements a knock up
to extend the duration and give this crazy epic and satisfying wombo combo kind of feel
within a really awesome moment of gameplay.
As for his Strike ability, it went through many more iterations.
It started out as a kind of angled slash crescent strike ability that would strike one way,
then the other, and then strike again a third time down the middle.
This idea of three strikes was pretty cool, and it was definitely fun to play with, but
it proved to be a bit too insane, so they decided to separate the triple slash ability
into three separate slashes that all interacted differently.
Another iteration was a slash ability that was specific to each hand.
Sometimes it would slash from his left hand in an arc, and sometimes it would slash from
his right hand in an arc.
Think something like a shorter ranged Diana crescent strike that could also come from
his left side as well as his right side, and the side that it came from took place at random.
This version was scrapped because it turned out that no one could figure out how to use
it effectively since it was random, and thus it became annoying to play with, and as well
it also was kind of pointless if you were actually skilled with him, since you could
always just turn around instantly to get the right angle, since the turn time for a character
model in league is just instant.
So that ability didn’t really make sense to put on his kit.
Eventually they came back to the idea of the three strike ability, since that ability was
super fun to play with, but since it was too strong, they wanted to keep the concept, but
tone it down, and they came up with the idea of just a single strike, where you would store
a charge, and on the third strike you would do some kind of extra bonus effect.
Originally, this extra bonus effect on the third hit actually did not have a knock up
in it, but after seeing how satisfying his ultimate was to land on a target and work
with, it became clear that making him rely on an ally for a knock up just wasn’t feasible,
and they gave the knockup to the third hit on his strike.
As well, they really liked how the concept of critical strikes went along with his theme
of having a swift and elegant strike, and they incorporated that into his strike ability
as well.
And they also liked the idea of giving him double crit chance, since it made a lot of
sense with his theme and was a pretty cool way for him to have crit chance become a much
more meaningful stat within his gameplay.
After they had his dash and strike elements in place, they began the long process of developing
Yasuo’s Parry.
His dash and strike fell into place quite easily actually, as those elements of gameplay
were simple to make satisfying and make sense thematically, however developing a parry kind
of effect for a melee carry proved to be a lot more complex.
In the beginning, they attempted to simply give Yasuo some strong defensive tools.
In one of the very first iterations of Yasuo, this parry element of gameplay existed on
his passive actually, in the form of a much more proactive shield.
This passive would give him a small shield every single time he cast a spell, with no
cooldown.
The shield only lasted for half a second, but since all of his abilities had extremely
low cooldowns to give him a very fast and complex style of gameplay, it became the case
where when you were fighting someone in a 1v1 or trading in lane, his health bar would
almost never move actually, since he would just get an insane amount of shields from
casting so many spells.
It was like having the old poppy passive on steroids, and it felt super frustrating to
play against, and as a result it was scrapped.
Meanwhile, CertainlyT had been fiddling around with this idea of blocking projectiles for
quite some time actually.
He had playtested it a lot on previous champions, and he knew that it was a super cool ability
and was awesome enough to where it would almost certainly make it into league of legends eventually,
it was just tough to find the right kind of champion for it.
One of his original designs for Darius, actually, included an ability that allowed Darius to
swing his axe in a targeted direction, knocking enemies aside, and also destroying all missles
that happened to be in the way.
So this wind wall kind of effect actually could have existed on Darius, but they decided
that it didn’t make that much sense in his kit thematically, and it didn’t really fit
in with the rest of his gameplay, so it was scrapped in the meantime.
Fast forward about a year later, and the design team was messing around with the concept of
blocking projectiles once again, and they looked towards the LCS pros actually to get
some opinions of what kind of champion they might like to see this ability on.
Most of the pros suggested putting this ability on a support, but it was actually HotshotGG
himself who recommended putting it on a melee AD carry, and the design team liked that idea
from Hotshot quite a bit, and decided to try it out as a version of the parry element for
Yasuo.
And CertainlyT came up with the idea for being able to place a wall down that blocked projectiles,
rather than a reactionary kind of ability that swatted them out of the air.
For a long time, it was quite controversial.
This mechanic was this new and scary thing that they wanted to bring into the game, and
as a result it proved to be quite the hard sell for the designers.
That wind wall went through a couple different versions, and potentially could have ended
up being a lot different.
Originally, the Yasuo wind wall would let explosive skills detonate when it hit the
windwall.
So something like Karma’s Q, instead of just disappearing, would explode at the wall
as if it had hit a minion or something, and if there was someone close enough to the radius,
they would of course take the damage and get slowed.
This variation actually felt really bad to play with as the Yasuo player, since it removed
his ability to block those kinds of spells completely, and it also created a lot of gameplay
moments where Yasuo accidentally killed his ally by changing where the skillshot exploded
at, causing them to be hit.
This chance to backfire was something that was just unacceptable for this type of ability,
since they were already struggling so hard to make it feel fun to play with, so even
though it felt a lot better to play against, there was no choice but to change it.
Another one of Yasuo’s designs for the original windwall allowed him to place it at a targeted
point anywhere within 1000 units of him.
It was a point and click where you could just place it down, but it ended up being a bit
too versatile, and difficult to outplay because the range on it was so high, that they decided
to confide it to being a set, melee range ability, as that made a lot more sense thematically
as well of being this short ranged samurai that is swift and intense.
Whenever you try to create a new and scary mechanic, it really comes down to two things.
First off, how fun is it to play with?
If it’s super fun, that usually makes the second part, which is how difficult or fair
is it to play against, a lot more lenient.
At first they were really skeptical about being able to put this kind of thing on a
champion, because they weren’t sure how fun it actually was to play with, while it
was almost certain to be frustrating to play against.
But in a playtest with Riot Gypsylord playing Lucian and Riot Morello playing Yasuo, there
was a moment where Lucian used his ultimate, and Yasuo blocked the entire thing with his
windwall, and they realized that was a super awesome moment, and it was when they realized
that yes, the windwall was super cool and fun to use, and had a place in the kit.
And from there, in order to combat that second point of making it more fair to play against,
they gave it a set, unchangeable range, that allowed you to outplay it through your positioning,
and that combed with the mind game of trying to bait it out, they settled upon the current
version that was fun to play with, and also a bit more fair to play against.
Actually coding the wind wall was also an incredibly difficult task.
They started with a prototype that would track all missiles on the map and tracked their
locations relative to the windwall, and if they connected it would remove them, but this
was super taxing on the server, and as a result it would make some of the super fast projectiles
sneak through a lot of the time.
Eventually, they came up with this design that whenever a missile enters the windwall,
it spawns a new missile that rapidly moves towards an invisible minion, and when that
minion is hit by the new missile, the original missile that connected with the windwall is
destroyed.
So Yasuo’s windwall is quite literally coded as minions.
And with all of that put together, the only thing left was his passive.
Yasuo was actually resourceless for almost all of his development, but they felt that
he needed a bit more skirmishing power, as he was still a bit too vulnerable, since wind
wall had a super long cooldown, so they came back to that idea of the shield, and in order
to make it feel more impactful they gave it kind of like a stattik shiv effect of having
it build up and then activate for a nice little shield, and they used Flow to showcase that
and communicate the shield effect in a reasonable way to opponents, so that it wasn’t just
coming out of nowhere.
And with all that, a couple more minor tweaks and fixes, and Yasuo’s gameplay kit had
been complete, and his theme of being this intense samurai had been captured quite well.
There was actually a time where the designers expected him to be playable in every single
role on support, and it’s funny how a lot of the abilities Yasuo ended up with are really
just a super toned down version of the original crazy idea, but that’s a lot of how CertainlyT’s
design style works.
He’s really good at coming up with fun concepts for gameplay, he just might not be the best
at making them fair on the first design, so it ends up resulting in a lot of toning down,
but often keeping the original gameplay idea intact, and we can definitely see that a lot
in Yasuo.
Yasuo ended up being honestly an incredible piece of work design wise.
The mechanics and complexity and depth that have gone into this character has resulted
in one of the most interesting and unique champions to exist in league of legends, and
I for one, now that the kinks have been ironed out, and the balance issues dealt with, see
Yasuo as a true work of art and a masterpiece of a champion, that really helped pioneer
the new standard of Riot’s champion designs.
Although a lot of the variations of Yasuo during his development were equally as awesome,
there’s no doubt that Yasuo is a pretty sweet champion.
That’s gonna be it for me today, thanks for watching everybody, subscribe if you want,
and I’ll see you guys next time.