Brandon: I think one of the things that sets League of Legends champions apart is just some of the sheer creativity.
Marc: We love trying to find these nuggets of great ideas, and then running with them and iterating until it can really come together to be a fantastic League of Legends character.
Ryan: And the magic sauce is, we’re insane.
Jeff: We get together in a room. We put up pictures. We get internet stuff.
We take any inspiration that is awesome, and as a group of creative people, we look at it and say,
‘What can we do with this? If we can make this the most awesome it could be, without any constraints, what would that be?
LEAGUE OF LEGENDS
CHAMPIONS RETROSPECTIVE
Marc: I think the thing that really defines League of Legends from a character perspective is the diversity of characters.
We really strive to have a range of unique and thematically differentiated, but extremely exciting characters.
MARC MERRILL, PRESIDENT/CO-FOUNDER
Brandon: One of the things we try to avoid is the cliché. You’re going to see a bunch of unusual takes on what the mage means.
You’re not gonna see the typical bearded wizard running around with a staff.
BRANDON BECK, CEO/CO-FOUNDER
Paul: Nautilus, Ziggs, and Lulu.
Adam: Warwick
Edmundo: Dr. Mundo
Ryan: Fiora
Eduardo: Ahri
Ryan: Brand
Eduardo: Wukong
Jeff: Teemo’s awesome. You’re not gonna kill Teemo. He’s too fast. He’s way too fast for you. You’re never gonna catch him.
Edmundo: You hit them with something unique, but it’s iconic in a way, right?
It’s recognizable and it just makes sense. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a little girl with a teddy bear, of course. Everybody loves that.’ But, the teddy bear grows and kicks your ass.
Tom: I think one of my go-to favorites has always been Annie. I just like how managing her stuns works.
Edmundo: I love Fiddlesticks. Fiddlesticks, I think, has been my masterpiece. It was one of those things where it just came from a sketch fast, on a bus. I walked out of the bus and I thought,
Wow. This sketch looks great. I brought it to the studio everybody just immediately gravitated towards it, you know?
It was one of those characters that again, the iconography was there. It was easily understood, but it was communicated in a way that nobody had really ever done.
Marc: It’s really amazing also that this dark and twisted little girl, who summons a flaming teddy bear,
could fight along side an animated scarecrow, fighting along side a demon jester, and a monster from another dimension and it all works, and feels consistent.
That’s really hard to do, and the team has done a phenomenal job making that happen.
THEME
Brandon: One thing that’s really important to us is theme.
A character needs to have a really central theme.
You have to kind of look at character and almost be able to know just from the splash image what its abilities are going to be, what it’s gonna do in the game.
How it’s gonna function, kinda what role it’s gonna play.
Marc: The blind monk, was a little thematically confused, where he had tiger tattoos, and had really long hair.
Just had some elements where it didn’t express his theme very appropriately.
Paul: So we had everybody in a room. We had all the concept artists going crazy on a direction for how to take a normal martial artist, and make him fit League of Legends, and one of our artists succeeded in doing that.
Meanwhile, Steven DeRose, who eventually went on to design that character was throwing prototypes in, throwing all types of crazy kits together,
and eventually, we all came together in kind of a short timeline to create the character we wanted.
And everyone was like, ‘Oh my god! He exists! He’s real!’ and he’s still to this day one of our most popular and fun champions. We’re really proud of him.
Brandon: Rammus, the Armordillo. He wears a thick shell, it’s spiky, if you bump into Ramus, if you attack Ramus, he’s actually going to reciprocate damage. So his whole kit is very unified.
You get that he can take a lot of damage, you get that he can reciprocate damage, you get that he’s gonna spin all around the map, and that’s an example of a thematically unified character.
Paul: Or like Nocturne. The guy is a living nightmare. He looks like it.
He plays like it, and his story, and his personality reflect it. I think it’s really cool.
Marc: Vayne is this really cool female character with a crossbow. She’s kinda this hunter of evil,
and it’s so unbelievably satisfying to tumble around the map and turn invisible and impale one of your enemies up against the wall with a huge crossbow bolt.
It feels really rewarding to play a character like her.
PLAYERS AND CREATORS
Jeff: The company that makes the game actually cares, and updates the game, and responds to feedback.
It’s like a living organism really. We’re tending to the game.
That’s kind of how we live – as gamers participating in a game that actually gets updated all the time.
Where the people that make it, play it every day and actually like, love it, and just want to make it better.
Marc: Everyone is laser-focused, no matter what role they have at the company,
whether it’s an artist perspective, or a designer perspective, or a system administrator.
Adam: It does go back to us being fans of the game, right? Like we want it to be epic.
ADAM MURGUIA, ART DIRECTOR
Ryan: What we really want to do is create a good variety of champions,
so that every player has a few to several champions a year that they just get absolutely stoked about,
instead of having a whole slew of champions that everybody is just kind of lukewarm about and nobody really buys into.
Brandon: The quality bar is always going up. As soon as we do something better in a new champion.
As soon as a new champion shows us – unlocks some new capability, all of a sudden, we want to do that for every champion going forward.
We want to go back and retrofit every champion with this innovation, with this better visual style, or better technology, or what-have-you.
Marc: One of the philosophies of the company is just that we’re always getting better in every dimension,
and we embrace that, and are excited to deliver a better game and better content for our players.