What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Riot’s development team very rarely come up with a new concept for a champion then
see it all the way through production.
Instead, they usually look for a gap in the game, such as a strategic niche or role that
they haven’t created a new champion for in a while.
Once that has been decided, they can look through old champion concepts or create new
ones to match it, and then start working on fleshing out the concept.
In Ornn’s case, it was the former—Riot knew they hadn’t created a new top lane
tank in a while, and wanted to fill that need, and in doing so they turned to an old concept
for a blacksmith champion.
Fortunately for the development team, the blacksmith concept already had a lot of clear
expectations, so they could immediately get to work filling out his character.
One of the most difficult tasks for the development team is to get a strong feel for a champion’s
identity in the early concept art.
One of the benefits to the use of an old concept was that nailing down his narrative and artistic
direction was a pretty smooth process, since Riot already had a pretty good idea early
on how he should appear and behave in game.
Sometimes when we look back at concept art, you can get a feel for how much iteration
it takes to really discover how the champion should appear, but in Ornn’s case, the early
concept art actually really closely mirrors his final design.
Despite the conceptualization period traditionally taking a good few months, it only took Riot
a month or two at the most to figure out the specifics; they wanted their blacksmith to
be a powerful Freljordian demigod, with links to volcanoes—after all, what would a blacksmith
champion be without a little bit of fire.
It introduced a pretty neat contrast to other Freljord characters, and it allowed Riot a
bit of creative freedom since it’s a niche that hasn’t really been explored much outside
of skins.
In fact, it seems like the only really difficult part of Ornn’s design was figuring out what
to do about his horns!
Since they had decided to give Ornn a pretty animalistic nature, Riot needed a way to tie
that into his outward appearance, with horns being the ideal way to do it.
In the beginning, Ornn’s horns were actually more like Walrus tusks, since it matched the
idea of power or dominance without necessarily being ‘evil.’
On the other hand, it tied Ornn to the ocean rather than the mountain, so it wasn’t a
perfect fit.
Riot also tried wooly mammoth style tusks, but those huge curved tusks introduced other
problems, such as limiting him from swinging his hammer freely, which would have been quite
a headache for the animation department.
Eventually Riot realised the solution to the horn dilemma lay in a much smaller mountain-dwelling
beast—the Ram.
Everything ended lining up pretty well; Ornn is of course a blacksmith, and he likes slamming
his hammer into things just as much as a ram likes to headbutt things.
The ram concept art had already inspired one of Ornn’s in-game abilities too—his ability
to charge and smash people into terrain—so the ram horn concept was locked in, and Riot
could start to really focus their attention on iterating the rest of his gameplay.
Although Riot do employ pretty typical fantasy archetypes when building their champions,
they prefer to use some kind of twist to really set them apart.
For example.
a blacksmith would traditionally be thought of as a support character.
In games or other media, blacksmith characters rarely do any fighting themselves, they are
typically just NPCs designed to help you along your way.
However, since Riot had already decided that they wanted to produce a new top lane tank,
they decided to split his archetype slightly, turning him away from the support role and
pushing him in a new direction; the warrior blacksmith.
Although this would give the development team a lot of freedom when it comes to kit design,
there is also a drawback—having too much ‘warrior’ and too little ‘blacksmith’
would kinda ruin the point of the champion.
The solution was to give Ornn new gameplay elements that would deliver on his blacksmith
thematic, without detracting from his ability to play as a solo laning tank.
This lead to the development of his split passive, giving him the ability to ‘craft’
his own items on the Rift rather than heading back to the shop to buy them, and also his
Master Craftsman passive, giving his teammates some upgraded versions of their items to choose
from.
Being able to craft your own items in lane was a stroke of genius, as it simultaneously
filled the need for a blacksmith-related ability, with the top lane fantasy of being able to
do whatever you want on your little top lane island, regardless of what the rest of the
map was doing.
It also introduced some interesting new strategy to the game that would have been too strong
for a lot of other top laners, particularly duellists.
Riot felt comfortable giving this power to Ornn, simply because he was designed to be
a tank.
If Fiora had the ability to kill you in lane then immediately buy her items and continue
pushing, you’d never get a chance to play the lane again, since your odds of winning
the fight would be drastically reduced due to the gold and XP disadvantage.
On the other hand, if Ornn manages to get ahead in lane, as a tank he’s more likely
to be unkillable rather than just killing you over and over again, so you’d still
get to play the game even if farming becomes more difficult.
Of course, Riot couldn’t just stop at one passive, and so the second one was designed
to give him another way to capitalize on his blacksmith theme.
The goal was to give a small collection of item upgrades that would not really impact
the early game, but would mean his team had the potential to be a little stronger in the
event that the game goes long enough for everyone to be max build.
Riot Reav3 actually noted that at one point, this part of his passive was actually completely
removed, but Riot found that they were still lacking enough ‘blacksmith’ elements to
his design without it.
Figuring out the specifics for each item upgrade was not an easy task; there had to be enough
power available to make a noticeable improvement to his team’s final builds, but Riot didn’t
want to distribute too much of Ornn’s power budget into a system that Ornn himself couldn’t
really get much use out of.
This is one of the reasons that Ornn doesn’t offer upgrades that benefit every champion
in the game.
Riot like that particular champions work well together while others don’t, and it provides
a bit of a limit to how effective the passive can be.
One of the first attempts at creating an Ultimate for Ornn involved trying to go even further
with the blacksmith theme, by simply causing him to upgrade his own hammer for either a
set amount of time or a certain number of auto attacks.
Riot came up with the idea of letting you pick between a few upgrades, such as increasing
it’s size for AoE auto attacks, refining it into a blade for some armor penetration,
or turning it into an axe for some kind of CC benefit.
Although it tied in with the blacksmith theme, there were a few issues.
Firstly, other elements of Ornn’s design weren’t coming through—such as his connection
to volcanoes, or his primal ‘Ram’ theme.
Secondly, the guy is meant to be a demigod, so surely he should have a much more spectacular
Ultimate than just smithing a better weapon for himself.
For a while, Riot tested using volcanoes in a really direct way, basically giving him
an Ultimate that literally spawned a volcano, known as ‘Murderhenge’ during testing.
The idea was that Ornn could channel power into it, and that would make it spit out lava
and boulders to mess up the battlefield.
Boulders would stun enemies that they landed on, and Ornn could charge into them, causing
them to explode.
As fun as it was, it was pretty RNG heavy and caused too much confusion on the map to
be ideal.
As Riot tried less obvious references to volcanoes, Squad5 came up with the idea of a Nami-Ultimate
style lava wave, only it would work in reverse and shift enemies closer rather than away
from Ornn.
Although the execution was unimpressive, it did give Riot a bit of a platform to work
on.
A few ideas were thrown around until art lead Riot Skeeziks drew up a concept that combined
the volcanic elements with the Ornn’s animalistic nature as a ram.
The result was a massive, red-hot molten ram that Ornn would summon from a huge distance.
Squad5 built on this design, adding the headbutt mechanic to redirect the ram, and the team
knew that they’d hit on the perfect Ultimate.
Ornn is a demigod after all, so his Ultimate had to deliver on that fantasy—and what
better way to do that than to summon a giant lava ram that stampedes over your enemies.
Although Ornn was looking pretty well rounded, Riot still needed a way to benefit his team
from a strategic perspective, and of course it had to tie into his thematic.
As a blacksmith, you have to constantly reheat metal in order to shape it, and this is what
lead Squad5 to come up with the new status effect, Brittle.
The initial idea was pretty simple—Ornn is tied to volcanoes, and he’s a blacksmith,
so being able to superheat his enemies or their armor is a pretty obvious connection.
What wasn’t obvious was what this new status effect should do; for example, it could just
be a glorified armor debuff.
Squad5’s solution was to consider what Ornn should bring to a team from a strategic perspective,
such as which characters Ornn should be picked with, whilst also ensuring that it would still
work for him while operating alone in the top lane.
Tanks are well known for their ability to soak up damage, but they are also one of the
key roles when it comes to dishing out crowd control.
This focus on crowd control and the idea of ‘striking while the iron is hot’ eventually
turned Brittle into something that hadn’t been done before in League of Legends—a
crowd control amplifier.
Tenacity allows players to reduce the duration of crowd control effects, so Brittle was designed
to act as a tenacity debuff, which essentially means it does the opposite and causes CC to
last longer.
It worked well, and fit closely with what a tank should bring to a team.
Ornn has his own CC that he can use with Brittle in a solo fight, but it also allows him a
level of synergy with teammates, particularly those that also pack powerful crowd control
abilities.
Although people do typically have mixed feelings about crowd control—Brittle’s design introduced
a lot of ‘high points’ that Riot really wanted to emphasize as a part of Ornn’s
gameplay.