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League of Legends is back with a Dev Update, outlining Quick Play, champion reworks, new skins, and a lot more coming in the next few months.
Executive Producer Jeremy “Riot Brightmoon” Lee and Head of League Studios Andrei “Riot Meddler” van Roon are joined by Game Director Pu “Riot Pupulasers” Liu in the latest Dev Update.
Quick Play
As part of the longer term decisions and investments for League, Pupulasers discussed introducing Quick Play which aims to eventually replace Blind Pick.
Blind Pick is the least popular queue in League and is slowly getting worse over time, according to him. Quick Play is the evolution of Blind Pick, and will offer what players want from Blind Pick but better. Quick Play allows players to pick their preferred champion and role, and they are guaranteed at least one of those in your next game, omitting Champ Select as a whole.
Testing will begin in specific regions in the coming months, and if the reception is good, it will be refined to offer the best possible experience.
Players get to pick 2 preferred Champions and 2 preferred Positions. All of these have to be unique. Then, a single “priority queue” needs to be chosen. The positions for that pick will change depending on what roles are currently low pickrate. Players will get one of your preferred picks a majority of the time, but filling is still not out of the question.
Champion Updates
Brightmoon and Meddler discussed the midscopes they are currently working on. They revealed that the current projects are Rell, Neeko, and Ivern, on top of the long-running Skarner one.
More information on Rell and Skarner’s reworks are available below. For Neeko, the team is having trouble specificlally with her newly introduced passive, which allows her to turn into way more things on the Rift. Ivern’s midscope will change what is perhaps the least exciting part of his kit: Daisy.
Rell Midscope
Game Producer Terra “Riot Yasuna” Ray and Champions Design Manager Stephen “Riot Raptor” Auker penned a different dev blog to discuss into detail the status of the Rell midscope update.
The Rell rework aims to meet several goals, according to Riot Raptor.
- Lean into the Mounted/Dismounted fantasy: Let Rell feel fast—like she can charge enemies down while mounted—and let her feel like a formidable fighter while dismounted.
- Increase Play Pattern Variance: Give Rell more options in lane and teamfights besides landing W, and make sure that while she’s dismounted, there are useful things she can do.
- Sand off some QoL issues: We’ve heard your feedback on some of the more frustrating parts of Rell’s kit, so we wanted to help alleviate some of them. We want to smooth out things like poor ward clearing, not being able to use E while alone, and Q having reduced power on subsequent enemies.
They also called out the fact that Rell feels overly punished when she misses her W, and doesn’t quite match expectations as a mounted lancer character. Another pain point was that her E can’t be used while she’s alone, so they’re changing that, too.
They also found a way to make her Q have a much stronger impact in both forms. They said that it now stuns, and that they are now working on polishing her VFX, SFX, animations, and interaction bugs.
Skarner Rework
There is a dedicated article on what is taking the Skarner rework so long, since it has been a year since his VGU was announced. One thing you need to know though – Skarner’s Impale is now AoE and he can (potentially) ult the entire enemy team now.
New Skins and Event Themes
Riot Meddler discussed that they are trying to explore more themes for skins this year. Faerie Court is the first this year, and will definitely not be the last. He teased two new skin themes are being explored for larger events this year, one for MSI and another for the large-scale summer event in the middle of the year.
Skins for champions who haven’t gotten one in a long time were also given a shout-out, especially Udyr, Shyvana, and Mundo. More Wild Rift skins are being ported over, this time revealing Star Guardian Senna and Star Guardian Orianna.
Star Guardian Senna, Orianna, and Seraphine will comprise the first wave of ported skins and are currently scheduled to go live on July. Redeemed Xayah and Rakan will follow in a later wave a bit later in the year.
Blue Essence Emporium
The Blue Essence Emporium will also be back this year! Brightmoon said that the back-end tech has been revamped and is likely to come back this summer. The Blue Essence Emporium, according to Brightmoon, will look and function similarly to the ones before.
32-bit Support
League of Legends is planning to phase out support for 32-bit systems, which will affect 0.01% of the player base. Starting patch 13.6, you will get a message in the client if you are affected by this change.
The change is planned to push on April 4th.
According to the accompanying dev blog, this change helps the dev team improve features such as security and anti-cheat and bot detection.