What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Today we are bringing you guys some awesome info about another crazy champion concept
that Riot Meddler recently described on Imaqtpie and Scarra’s League of Legends podcast,
Beyond the Rift.
While fielding questions from the chat, Meddler was asked if there were any other really awesome
and crazy champion concepts that didn’t end up working out, that the community hasn’t
heard
about before.
That character was the Ink Mage, and we’re going to dive into the overall concept, how
it would have worked and if we could ever see the Ink Mage in game one day in the future.
The Beyond the Rift viewer question started out by asking if the designers ever regret
some of the work they’ve done in the past.
Riot Meddler immediately confirmed this was the case; particularly back when Riot was
producing a new champion every two weeks.
The speed of development meant a lot of champions were being produced without enough time to
really flesh out and balance their kits.
There’s also a really noticeable drop in overall production quality like art and backstory
for these champions, since it’s just simply not enough time to put out a high quality
character.
This is a big part of the reason that Riot is so focused on reworks and VGUs currently—they
want all aspects of their game to be up to the same high standard, and that means going
back to previous champion releases and making improvements where possible.
He even provides Yorick as an example, who apparently had his Ultimate changed two weeks
before release because it was so insanely buggy.
Meddler went on to address the second part of the question, asking about some of the
craziest champion ideas that they came up with.
The champion concept that immediately came to mind was the Ink Mage, a character that
would cast his spells by drawing out shapes and other things in-game.
The idea was that you’d use your mouse almost like a paint brush, so it would probably be
a super challenging champion to control properly.
Imaqtpie and Scarra seemed instantly impressed, noting how sick this concept sounded, but
Meddler quickly pointed out a major flaw.
The concept was really fun when you were doing it without any pressure, for example if you
were playing by yourself.
But if you were in the middle of a hectic teamfight, it would be insanely difficult
to control and be useful while trying to stay alive and move around.
One game that does use a similar ‘gesture-system’ to this is Okami, a Capcom game originally
developed for Playstation 2.
The gesture-system comes in the form of the Celestial Brush, which allows players to pause
the game and bring up a canvas that they can paint on.
These paintings can do lots of different things; you can use the system to slice an enemy,
solve puzzles and use all sorts of other abilities.
Although the painting system worked insanely well for Okami, there’s one big factor here
that makes it really tricky for a game like League—the game can’t be paused.
Okami is a single player adventure, and that means having a game mechanic that requires
you to pause the game and paint is totally fine.
In an online multiplayer game, players would instead have to draw extremely quickly to
make sure they cast spells before they end up dying to something around them.
This is the chief concern that Riot had with their Ink mage concept, even if it was awesome
and unlike anything else in game, it would be really difficult to find the right way
to do it and to find the right context for that character.
Finding the right context for a character is really important, and in his excitement
for the concept, Imaqtpie actually came up with a really clever way to make it work.
His idea was to turn the Ink Mage into a support, and give him an Ultimate that would allow
him to draw a box around his target, shaping the terrain and essentially trapping them.
A support champion is likely the best way to make the Ink Mage work, for a few reasons.
To start with, you need to consider the actions per minute (or APM for short) requirements
of most champions in each role.
ADCs and mid laners in particular tend to require high APM, because they are poking
the enemy laners, taking CS and constantly moving to avoid damage.
If the Ink Mage was a mid laner, he’d need to be able to move around, last hit, and somehow
draw his spells with his mouse too—it’s really overloaded and places too much focus
on mouse usage.
This is where the shift to support comes in; although you still need to move around, you
don’t need to focus so much on last-hitting, so instead you can afford to use your mouse
to cast your spells.
Riot could even try something crazy and give that character a secondary movement tool,
like using the arrow keys to move so you keep your mouse free to paint the spells, just
to keep the skill floor down a little.
Another way that Riot could make the Ink Mage a little less complicated to use in a fight
is to stick to really rudimentary gestures.
Painting a cut across an enemy, could be a pretty simple way to make their main damage
tool work, and it would happen quick enough that there would be no need to pause.
In fact, the whole idea of quickly moving your mouse across someone is already pretty
similar to what players do when they want to smart-cast an ability like Viktor’s Death
Ray, so it’s not too much of a stretch.
Other spells could also be a lot more rudimentary in nature, there’s no need to force players
to paint complicated structures or spells.
For example, drawing a quick plus sign or circle while holding down a specific ability
button could work as a heal or barrier-type spell, and it would be casted quickly enough
that players won’t struggle too much use it in a fight.
As for QTpie’s idea of painting a box around an enemy for the Ultimate, Riot could simply
make pressing ‘R’ create the box, and then players could strengthen the different
sides by painting over them.
That way you wouldn’t need to somehow paint the box around a moving target while also
moving yourself, which would be really difficult, but you’d still get the effect of painting
to increase the effectiveness of the Ultimate.
The act of painting over the shape could have different effects—maybe it would add bonus
CC effects or some kind of ink-blindness, or perhaps it could just add some damage if
your target passed through the sides you’ve painted so far.
One thing that would essentially design itself is the resource that the Ink Mage would use.
It makes sense that rather than using mana or energy, the Ink Mage would instead have
an Ink Supply.
This would limit the number of times he could use abilities or paint creatures in the same
way that a mana bar does, and coupled with cooldowns it could be used to balance him
quite effectively.
We’re not sure about how he should go about replenishing his supply though; perhaps he’d
have to go back to the base, or could go around collecting something, kinda like Bard and
his chimes.
Maybe he’d go around harvesting ink from the vegetation, or maybe all it takes is a
dip into the river to harvest some ink sacs from an octopus.
Okay that last one was a joke, but Riot are good at coming up with this kinda thing so
I’m sure they’d be able to figure it out.
Speaking of Riot, you guys are probably wondering if we’ll ever realistically see a champion
like this in the game.
Well, we’ve got some good news for you.
On his Quick Gameplay Thoughts post on November 10th, the day after the Beyond the Rift podcast,
Meddler was asked for more details on the Ink Mage concept.
Although he didn’t offer any more insight, Meddler did note that they might revisit the
concept one day, although he did say a lot of the things in the concept sounded better
on paper than they actually worked in game, for the reasons we outlined earlier.
Still, we know Riot likes to keep things under wraps to avoid building any hype in a product
that won’t ever see release (we’re looking at you, Ao Shin), so Meddler’s reply definitely
lends a little more credibility to the discussion and means that it might not be the last we
hear of the Ink Mage.
Anyway, that’s all we’ve got for you today, but we’d love to hear your ideas on how
to make this kickass concept work in-game, so make sure your share any ideas you have
in
the comments!