So players bring up stealing ultimates as a champion ability a lot.
It's something that I think is pretty common as a obvious thing
that League of Legends is missing that's really cool
but tech wise we've never really been able to do it.
When I told people that I was going to be working on Sylas
everybody was sort of
"There's no way."
"There's just no way that we can make this work."
You know, like, anything we did in the past we'll have to redo everything
because these characters were created without expecting
their spells to be shared.
There's significant problems that can arise that make it so that
Sylas couldn't have access to their spell.
So one of the very first things that we did, we set out goals for what we want to hit.
One of those goals was, "We will not make development on League of Legends
any harder because Sylas exists in the game."
Like, "Oh I have to check this box or else there's a bug with Sylas."
Or if every test plan of every character you make
has to say, "Oh don't forget to test Sylas," like that's a failure,
we've created more overall work for making content.
We sat down in a room and for every character we listed out exactly what we expected
for that ultimate to do when Sylas takes it.
And we argued about it too.
So, like, example: Fiora.
Fiora just says all of her passive works.
If we give just the R to Sylas
clearly nothing is going to happen.
Fiora should do more than put a circle around them.
So, we said, as a player, if I take Fiora's ultimate
I expect to interact with all the vitals just as Fiora would.
So that means we need some way to attach this buff to that spell.
So I think 97 out of the 141 characters
that are currently in the game required some level of spell refactoring.
There's was this one class of characters that as a whole, was particularly troublesome.
We came to call them transformers.
There's the obvious ones like Nidalee, Elise,
Karma, Jayce, Heimerdinger, Shyvana.
So holistically they completely replace all of their abilities.
We don't want Sylas to just cast one spell as Nidalee or Jayce.
So instead for those you become Jayce or Nidalee, or Elise.
And your Q, W, and E are now different.
That comes with its own set of problems where it's like, okay,
now you have to make sure that not only do the ultimates work
now every spell that that character comes with has to work as well.
However, Jayce is even farther along in that
Jayce switches between hammer and gun form.
That's what his ultimate does.
And Jayce expects to go from hammer to ranged to hammer to ranged.
Sylas goes from not Jayce to ranged and then back to not Jayce
which is not hammer form Jayce.
And then when he is no longer Jayce and he's Sylas again,
he has to put his kit back together.
And that's with all the transformers.
When Sylas turns away from being them again we have to make sure that
he doesn't keep their spells which would be awful.
What we had to do is go back through all these champions
and update them to newer standards.
We've learned a lot about better ways to put things together
and things are easier to fix for the future.
Some things are very much easier to make.
While it does have pretty insane technical challenges to overcome
I really think that this project will open doors for the rest of our design team.
Very much in the past it's been
"I have this crazy harebrained idea. There's no way we can make that work."
But here we are doing the crazy harebrained idea and
I think it really does shift our mentality in the earlier phases to
"Let's push these constraints more and see what sort of crazy things
that we can actually deliver through our champions."