Hey everybody, we're back with another Dev Update video.
Today is March 8th.
My name is Jeremy, aka Riot Brightmoon.
And I'm Andrei, also known as Meddler.
Now, later in this video, we're going to introduce you to another member of our team
Pu Liu, who's the game director of League of Legends.
But first, let's talk about some champion updates.
So as we've mentioned previously, we're looking to do more
champion updates this year and in the future.
And we want to give you an update on one particular type of those: midscopes.
Champion updates, you know, they're not one size fits all.
Different champions have different needs.
For some, it's the art. For others it's gameplay. For some it's both.
And midscopes are a focus on gameplay in particular—champions where we think
we have a lot of opportunity or a lot of problems to fix.
Now that we've got Yuumi out of the way though—
she jumped to the front of the pack as a bit of a problem in all skill levels across League—
we can focus on a few other champions.
And right now we're working on Rell.
Where they’re trying to help her live up to her mounted knight lancer fantasy sort of thing,
that we think is pretty compelling, but not quite there.
Neeko. We’re still pursuing her passive that lets her transform into a
wider range of things across the Rift. Wards, minions, monsters, etc.
And Ivern. We’re looking particularly at some usability changes for Daisy there.
We'll have more on all of those at a later date as well.
Now, even though Skarner is not a midscope, we wanted to give you an update today.
Skarner has been taking us a while because, let's face it,
he has a lot of challenges.
The Brackern, the crystals, the scorpion of it all.
You know, none of these are super clear.
None of these are really that compelling for players.
So we've been asking ourselves a lot, what do we want to keep or change from his kit?
It's definitely the spires. Keep the spires.
Everyone loves them.
It's not the spires.
So Skarner has been taking a little bit longer, like I mentioned,
and he's going to come out later than we had hoped.
But today we're going to provide some more information on how it's going.
So we've got a blog coming out that will go into more of our high level goals
and well, as well as some thinking about our game design changes,
narrative updates and new art direction.
When it comes to skins and event themes, something worth pursuing
this year is trying to get more new themes being explored.
The first example of that, Faerie Court,
should be either out on PBE or going live soon by the time you see this video.
We've also got a couple of new themes
that we're exploring for larger events coming in the moderate future.
One of those will be MSI in May and the other will be the largest
summer event in the middle of the year.
In addition to exploring new themes,
we're also making some skins for champions
who just haven't got some in a while and need a bit of love.
Udyr, Shyvana, and Mundo are the new three to call out there.
And finally, skin-wise, we actually want to go back to the Wild Rift
skin transition thing we talked about last time.
It's looking like we should be able to get the first set of skins over
from Wild Rift sometime around July at a rough guess.
In addition to a Star Guardian Seraphine, who we mentioned previously,
we're also looking to bring over Star Guardian Senna and Star Guardian Orianna.
Redeemed Xayah and Rakan will then follow in a later batch a bit later in the year.
So something we've seen you ask a lot about lately is the Blue Essence Emporium.
So I wanted to give you an update on that.
Last year we announced that we were gonna take it down, do some technical work on it
before we were going to be able to bring it back to you all.
So we’ve been working on that.
We have some revamped tech that supports it
and we’re aiming to bring it back this summer.
That's not a guaranteed timeline but it’s looking very likely.
That version that you see this summer will be pretty similar to how it was before
even though it’s gonna be functioning a lot differently under the hood
so that we can make so cool change to it in the future.
And now we'd like to introduce Pu, who we mentioned earlier.
Who is going to talk about some of the longer term investments
and decisions we're making for League.
Hey y’all! I’m Pu, aka Pupulasers, and I’m League's game director.
My role in the team is to help us understand and serve League’s diverse audiences.
Whether you're a Master-level Ranked player, which I am not... an ARAM main,
or someone who's just excited to play your favorite champions
in different ways in League of Legends.
What you all want from League changes over time
and as the team working on League of Legends,
we need to learn with you and change with you, in order to give
you guys the best experience possible.
As Kha’Zix says, “Change is good.”
So an example of change coming up is Quick Play.
Blind Pick is the least popular queue in League of Legends,
and it's actually getting worse over time.
We want to evolve that into Quick Play in order to give you guys
what you want about Blind Pick in a better way.
So similar to the old Team Builder, we're going to allow you to choose
your favorite champion, your favorite role, and you're guaranteed
to get at least one of those in your next game.
The queue’s going to pop,
and you're going to see which champion and role you got,
and you'll go right into the gameplay.
We're excited about this and want to test it
in a few regions in the coming months and see if you all like the direction.
If you do, we'll work with you to refine it
and make sure it's as good as possible in order to make your experience better.
Another thing that's going on is that starting on April 4th,
League will no longer be supported by 32 bit operating systems,
meaning that players will have to move to 64 bit.
Now that sounds kind of scary,
but this actually impacts less than 1/10 of a percent of players worldwide.
If this affects you, you'll get a message starting in Patch 13.7.
This allows us to help move League into the future.
There's a couple of areas we’re immediately targeting
such as improving security features, our anti-cheat, and bot detection.
Ultimately, this allows for bigger dreams, bigger possibilities
for League of Legends, and we're excited about what we can do with experience.
That's it for me!
I'll hand things back to Meddler and Brightmoon.
As a reminder, if you're interested,
please do check out the blogs
we've got on midscopes and Skarner’s VGU, which are also out now.
We'll be back to check in with you again soon.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you on the Rift.
Thank you all.