What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Champion concepts are perhaps one of the most mysterious, and to me interesting things about
League of Legends, and there’s one particularly cool champion concept that sticks out to me
as being especially interesting, which is a character that goes by the name of Tempus.
He’s quite an old concept and has been long forgotten throughout the years, so join me
today in trying to find out, what the hell happened to tempus?
And if you guys enjoy the video hit that like button and if you don’t hit that dislike,
because if this video gets uh 5 ratings Ill make another video!
Anyway Tempus’ original name was actually Aeon, named after the game Aeon of Strife
or perhaps Andrew Brownwell, aka Riot Aeon but his name was changed to Tempus because
of what I imagine were legal reasons conflicting with the game or maybe just because they wanted
to change his name or something, and honestly Tempus is a cooler name anyway.
And Tempus, is a character that was mentioned here and there quite a bit by Riot Ezreal
on the official League of Legends Forums a while back, and he brought up bits and pieces
here and there in 2010 as well as in 2011 and 2012.
Throughout Riot Ezreal’s posts he refers to both Tempus and Aeon kind of hand in hand,
and in this video I’ll be using the name Tempus only to stay consistent, but just know
that any case of someone talking about Aeon does mean they were also talking about tempus,
because they are the same character.
Tempus was described by Riot Ezreal to be a male time-themed DPS physical damage assassin
that he was extremely excited to create at the time.
He was said to be able to deal a ton of damage, but be incredibly squishy, being described
as a melee physical cross between ezreal and kassadin, who was squishy but capable of awesome
things.
And around 2012 it was announced that Tempus had been officially put on an indefinite hold.
Riot Ezreal had mentioned that the reason why Tempus had been put on hold was because
and I quote, “I put a fairly risky kit on him and had to split my attention before testing,
so he is currently not being worked on.”.
And by a risky kit what he means is just a kit that has a lot of crazy stuff in it to
where it has a lot of potential to not actually be possible to put in the game for one reason
or another.
And from there Tempus was put on permanent hold, and a few months later announced that
he was on permanent Hiatus, and we haven’t heard anything about him ever since.
So we do know a bit about his actual gameplay kit, some of the abilities Tempus had, or
at least some abilities that were tested on him, involved a couple of different things.
I’m not entirely sure which ability was on which button, but one ability was somewhat
of a fast forward themed ability that gave him attack speed with some sort of stacking
debuff, to give him sustained damage over time, since he was physical damage based.
This would have given him some nice sustained damage for a period of time, but then after
a while he would get hit with a significant debuff, so it could have created some interesting
scenarios of setting up windows of opportunity.
Another ability was a line based nuke that also teleported him the distance of the ability.
Riot Ezreal describer this ability as a really awesome blink, and knowing Ezreal’s typical
design patterns, he’s a designer who likes to put blinks on people so this was probably
a very fast ability that gave true movement, and gave him a fairly assassin based playstyle.
He also had an ability that was a damaging nuke whose damage would get canceled and the
health refunded if if the target wasn’t killed within a certain number of seconds.
This could be a really cool ability, but it does create a lot of binary gameplay situations
and is at risk of being very unrewarding to play with, since you are left feeling as if
you were useless if you didn’t actually kill the target with this.
There was also a variation of this ability that would cause the damage to fade off over
time, and it was said to be an ability that actually did pretty well.
This type of interaction would certainly be very unique, but if you boil it down it’s
kind of just a big damaging nuke, that then gives your opponent a heal over time so this
variation probably doesn’t make as much sense as the previous one at least.
And for his passive, he was going to have something that gave him stats as each minute
passed, similar to rod of the ages.
Potentially an interesting concept but had a lot of potential to just be broken as hell
or entirely useless based on the actual scaling.
So overall his kit does seem to be pretty crazy, or risky is the term that Riot Ezreal
used, and I definitely have to agree with them, there’s a lot of mechanics in this
paper kit that just seem very scary or perhaps controversial in the sense that they have
a ton of potential to just be broken beyond belief or super anti fun and unhealthy.
Anyway as I’m sure many of you have figured out already, Tempus shares quite a lot of
similarities to another melee time themed assassin that made it into the game, which
is of course Ekko, especially in terms of thematics.
They do have a few differences though, despite having nearly identical themes, Tempus’
gameplay kit is a lot different, and Tempus was also physical damage based rather than
magic damage based, but it does seem like Tempus’ theme of being a time themed assassin
had a big influence on making Ekko into the champion he is today.
However this is a bit of a peculiar story, since there is actually no confirmation in
any way whatsoever that tempus influenced Ekko’s creation.
In fact, It’s actually quite likely that the two concepts are entirely separate and
that Riot gypsylord just happened to make a time themed assassin without ever even knowing
about Tempus, since he never brought it up or said anything about Tempus when he talked
about Ekko’s previous development, and He’s shared a lot of development stories and cancelled
champions in the past, so It’s not like he would actively choose not to share the
information, because he has shown that he is okay sharing that kind of information in
the past, but with one exception.
The one exception in this case where he would actively go out of his way to not say anything
about Tempus in relation to Ekko is if Tempus happened to actually still be in development
right now.
Maybe his character has evolved or changed into something else, and was still being worked
on, then it’s very likely that Gypsylord wouldn’t have said anything.
So on paper at first glance it seems extremely obvious that Tempus was just transformed into
Ekko but looking at the details I’m not entirely sure, and there’s a good chance
that Tempus is either still being worked on, or just didn’t actually contribute to Ekko,
and it just happened to be a coincidence that Ekko and Tempus are both male time themed
assassins.
There hasn’t really been any information about Tempus since the info Riot Ezreal presented,
so I can’t say with 100% certainty what happened to him, but it’s interesting that
there is just a little sliver of potential that Tempus will eventually be released as
a champion in the future.
Anyway, what do you guys think about Tempus?
Leave a comment, and drop a like if you enjoyed the video, subscribe if you want, thanks for
watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!