Before we even start a project, we look at what exists and try to distill
what about it do we want to keep?
I think for the players that main him, they still love Mordekaiser, right?
Mordekaiser is iconic to the game.
He's like a walking fortress.
-An unstoppable wall of metal. -That smashes people.
It's the fantasy of being this sort of Lord of Death.
From a visual standpoint and the gameplay
I think there's a disconnect like we see the splash
you kind of think you know what his playstyle is going to be.
And then in game, "Wait am I a mage?"
"Do I even use my mace?"
And so in the VGU, we really wanted to approach
how do we make sure that through-line is clean all the way
while keeping at least the feelings and the elements and the things that
those old players did like about the champion and bringing them forward.
So when we pick a champion that we're ready to do a VGU on
we assemble a team that's a designer a writer or narrative, and an artist
that we call DNA.
The DNA pod sits down and talks about how do we take the old pizza feet Mordekaiser
and make him look like a modern champion but still immediately recognizable
as Mordekaiser?
We really wanted to focus on the fact that
he is this indomitable warlord who's able to crush his enemies
and capture their soul for his own purposes.
This is sort of an earlier stage
just trying to figure out the shape of Mordekaiser, what was the
key visual motifs.
And that's when we came up with the idea of making it like architecture.
We also looked at his entire kit very very closely
to see if there's anything we should bring forward like the ultimate.
Mordekaiser's old ultimate was
he would kind of put a debuff on a target and if the target died while
that debuff was on them
then Mordekaiser kind of captured their ghost.
He basically becomes a two-man army at that point
and though that is cool
it doesn't really fit with what somebody with a big mace wants to do.
It still takes away from the thing that you want to do with him which is
to dominate people with Mordekaiser
not have Mordekaiser command someone else to dominate.
We did try to bring the ghost forward and by try, I mean we had it in
for months and months and at the end of the day
what we found was that the experience we were creating as a whole
was sort of detrimented by having the ghost.
So we ultimately decided that while it pained us greatly to remove it
that it would be better for the current kit to just not have
that brought forward.
Overall, we wanted to deliver on
like the core of what we believe Mordekaiser to have been all along
which is this like death archon.
In this particular case, I think you could represent Lord of Death anywhere on the kit
but the obvious spot to attack from is the ultimate.
So it's with the ultimate that we're like "How can we create this story in League of Legends
in a matter of seconds?"
So Mordekaiser's current background:
Mordekaiser is interested in seizing the souls of the living
to help him build the afterlife that he was denied.
So he's constructing his own Death Realm.
In terms of gameplay, Mordekaiser can choose a victim to bring with him to the Death Realm
and they are cut off from their teammates completely.
So the Death Realm is just another interaction layer of the game
so I can't see anybody in the Summoner's Rift layer and no one in the Summoner's Rift layer
can see me in the Death Realm layer.
So now all of the things about using my teammates,
getting knockups or heals or stuns or all that stuff is gone.
It's me versus Mordekaiser and Mordekaiser versus me.
But another thing we wanted to keep in mind too is the opponent's side of it.
We didn't want this spell to just feel like a death sentence.
Mordekaiser cast this on me
I just actually die and there's nothing I can do about it
which is why there's still a fight.
There's really cool plays of flashing over a wall to get away from him
or if you are really crafty
kind of outsmart him and having that goal can allow the enemies to get
pulled into the Death Realm to still have a fighting chance against him.
I feel like with the update this is a great opportunity for us
to sort of reintroduce League of Legends players to Mordekaiser.
And for the players out there who really really like old Mordekaiser
my hope is that we have considered those players as much as we can
and that we have brought forward the best version of the champion that
we can deliver to as many players as want to play it.
Like feeling like they get to be this death lord juggernaut.
The power of the mace smashing their opponent
and then, the ability with that Ultimate to say to your opponent,
"There is no escape from Mordekaiser."