What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
For today’s episode of What Could Have Been, we’ll be looking at Zoe, the Aspect of Twilight.
As a character that was heavily influenced by artwork rather than being designed to fit
a particular playstyle or use any new mechanics, Zoe is a really cool example of top-down design.
We’re going to start out by focusing on her character development, then we’ll go
into detail about her gameplay and how it all came about.
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Riot’s artists spend a lot of time coming up with interesting character concepts, since
it helps create a pool of sources that champion developers can draw inspiration from.
In Zoe’s case, that inspiration actually came from seeing a connection between different
art concepts.
The art department had created awesome looking characters that were all different species,
but a lot of these concepts had a focus on young characters, which aren’t particularly
well represented by League’s roster, which kinda makes sense because children don’t
tend to be the best fighters.
Having said that, it’s something that Riot have definitely made work in the past, so
the development team started to get excited about creating a character concept that was
actually really young and childlike.
Riot BananaBandit’s champion insight post about Zoe mentioned that Riot chose to build
on the playful aspect of childhood and combine it with the ‘Trickster God’ archetype
to produce a character that would bend the rules of reality.
Her appearance, voiceover, gameplay and even her existence in the game itself are all intentionally
a little bit unlike the rest of the game, since it helps push home that feeling of a
reality-bending character that is just a little out of place, and really just wants to have
fun.
There’s a lot of concept art available for Zoe, and it really shows her development as
a character clearly.
Riot Tysmurph shared a lot of his early Zoe work on Twitter, and you can see her curious
personality shining through in all of them.
There’s obviously the playful, childlike nature that is necessary to make the character
work, but the art also shows how mischievous and energetic she is, as well as demonstrating
some of her abilities through the use of portals.
As development advanced and Riot moved more towards the ‘Aspect of Twilight’ identity,
you can see her art becomes a lot more refined, with the artists borrowing colors from other
Targonian characters to keep Zoe on theme.
At the same time, the artists explored her cosmic roots by giving her the trademark long,
colorful and sparkly hair, and clothing that really doesn’t tie in with any of the modern
Targonian designs, or anything else in the game for that matter.
As Riot started to explore gameplay for Zoe, the original goal was to create a light-hearted
burst mage.
The benefit of creating a mage is that you can head into development with a blank slate;
there’s no checklist of requirements that a mage really needs to have.
Zoe’s designer, CertainlyT, mentioned Irelia as an example.
When you want to design a melee top laner, you need sustainability and ways to deal with
tanks.
For Irelia that meant healing on-hit, true damage and CC, and that means there’s already
a whole load of her kit locked down that you can’t really mess with.
For a mage, all you really need is a fair chunk of damage, and you can be really creative
with how you give them that damage, and how you design the rest of the kit.
CertainlyT started out Zoe’s gameplay development by focusing on her trickster elements, which
he tried to achieve by using a mirror mage concept.
So the idea was that you’d be using light, deception and reflecting abilities back at
your opponents.
Although Zoe would later end up with a vaguely similar ability in Spell Thief, Riot moved
away from the initial mirror mage concept since there’s not really many novel ways
to use mirrors in abilities that hit the fantasy they were going for, since they’d feel pretty
unexciting to use.
Instead, CertainlyT started looking for ways to turn ‘playfulness’ into actual abilities.
Essentially instead of focusing on mechanics, he focused on ways to have fun with abilities
in a more light-hearted way.
This gave way to Zoe’s Paddle Star, which feels really playful and fun to use thanks
to the bounce functionality.
CertainlyT noted that although the Paddle Star took up most of her power budget because
of the long-range and huge damage, the cool thing about it is that you could play a game
of League using only her Q, and still have a reasonably good time doing it.
The rest of her kit couldn’t contain much power because that Q is just so damn strong,
so it became more about giving Zoe tools to land her Paddle Star, but without making counterplay
too difficult.
For example, while a free Flash is never going to be weak, Zoe’s W isn’t a particularly
powerful ability.
However, it allows for players to have a lot of fun while also building on Zoe’s childish
curiosity—she’s just exploring, picking up stuff and playing with it.
The most clever part of Zoe’s kit design was probably her E, Sleepy Trouble Bubble.
CertainlyT needed a way to help Zoe land her Paddle Star, and that meant giving her some
crowd control.
At the same time, he didn’t want Zoe to become too annoying to play against, so that
meant making the CC less useful when used defensively.
This led him to implement a delayed CC effect, so it’s probably not going to save her when
she’s being dived, but it will definitely help her make offensive plays and needs some
damage from her Q. The impressive part is that it builds so well into her fantasy at
the same time.
Kids like bubbles, and kicking a bubble across the map is a pretty cool childish idea for
an ability.
The CC is also a sleep, which plays into her trickster identity without making her malicious,
and combining her E and Q results in a delayed sleep followed by a big chunk of damage.
That basically captures exactly what and who Zoe is as a character; she’s a mischievous
cosmic messenger here to warn you that bad things are going to happen shortly.
The last parts of Zoe’s development we want to touch on are her scrapped abilities, since
they honestly give the best indication of how different a champion could have been.
At the end of the day League of Legends is a game, so it’s the gameplay that really
decides who and what a character brings to the table.
Unfortunately in Zoe’s case, a lot of the scrapped abilities that we know about don’t
really change much about how she would have been in-game.
A lot of this has to do with the more character-driven artistic focus of the champion, since it wasn’t
about trying out a ton of different mechanics and figuring out which fit her best.
For example, one version of her Ultimate actually made her untargetable while she travelled.
It was still the same Portal Jump, but you couldn’t attack her when she popped out
or catch her once she re-appeared at her original location.
This was super annoying to deal with in playtests, especially since you’d be getting two periods
of untargetability rather than one, and it meant there wasn’t really enough opportunities
for counterplay.
Another version of her Ultimate gave Zoe the ability to self-cast it, which would turn
it into a single blink rather than having her jump back afterwards.
As a trade-off, you didn’t get to choose which direction to blink to; it’d be totally
random.
That meant you’d essentially self-cast Portal Jump as an emergency button when you needed
to escape and decided to take the chance.
According to CertainlyT, he really liked this mechanic because Portal Jump can’t otherwise
be used to escape an enemy, but literally everyone who playtested the ability actually
hated it because it just felt too random.
Although a random direction blink could save your life now and again, it could also just
teleport you back closer to an enemy tower or further away from safety, and then you
feel like you died and totally wasted your Ultimate at the same time.
There’s only been one ability shared by Riot so far that seems to hint at a previous
form of Zoe that we don’t know much about, where she was apparently a fairy-themed creature
a bit more like Lulu in terms of her backstory.
Essentially the map would have clouds floating around, and Zoe could walk into them to turn
invisible.
Since the clouds moved, that meant you had these moving, unwardable brushes to hide in.
Apparently this fairy version of Zoe had a similar Portal Jump ability, because she could
Portal into a cloud and not be forced to jump back to her original position.
Essentially you’d be able to see her use the Portal, but you wouldn’t know which
cloud she was in.
This doesn’t sound too broken, but the clouds always traveled from the north-west corner
of the map to the south-east.
Basically that means you’d press R, ride a cloud for a while, and then double kill
bot lane with absolutely no warning.
After hearing about this, I’m actually glad they decided to make a Disney character instead.