League of Legends will be getting less new champions but more game modes in the future, according to a recent update by Riot Games.
The State of League of Legends Game Modes
Riot Games put out multiple informative content at practically the same time. Few of them discussed game-modes: the /dev diary video featuring Andrei “Riot Meddler” van Roon, Head of League Studios, and Jeremy “Riot Brightmoon” Lee, Executive Producer for League of Legends (and its corresponding TL;DW blog post) and a dedicated post from the Game Modes team.
The video did not discuss much new information on top of the dedicated blog post, but it did reveal that some manpower has been shifted away from the New Champions Team over to the Game Modes team. So, what does this mean for the playerbase? “The result of [the shift] is that we should have some meaningfully faster progress on building new game modes and getting older game modes back in 2023.” It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though, as this also means fewer new champions in 2024.
On the /dev blog by Game Modes Design Lead Daniel “Riot Maxw3ll” Emmons and Game Modes Product Lead Eduardo “Riot Cadmus” Cortejoso, more details about game modes and ARAM were divulged.
2v2v2v2 Game Mode
Most notably, we got more information about the 2v2v2v2 game mode, and a confirmation that it will be on a new map and that it can be expected this summer. Riot Maxw3ll enumerated the goals for this game mode.
- Quickly get players into champion vs champion combat.
- Push champion customization beyond where League has traditionally gone.
- Minimize time spent dead or trapped in a frustrating game.
The game mode will be in “several deathmatch-style rounds” and that each champion will progress in power over the game. A new mechanic will be introduced that will go on top of levels and items called Augments, inspired by TFT's mechanic of the same name.
Augments are described as “significant power-ups that are intended to create unique builds for champions.” The Augments previewed above are those that lean into making a champion's base stats and strengths stronger, but there are also options to flex your Augments into new branches for “cool, unique combat situations.” As testament to the latter, they shared some of these unique playstyles:
- Sylas who casts Lissandra W every 5 seconds
- Ekko with 500 attack range
- A Kai’Sa who dives the enemy team, dies immediately, and then creates a huge explosion post-mortem that wipes out a huge chunk of her two enemies’ remaining health
The promised return of Nexus Blitz will also become reality this year, but after the 2v2v2v2 deathmatch game mode.
Rotating Game Modes
The other game modes, including the neglected Ultimate Spellbook and One-For-All, will be seen in the latter half of 2023. Support for the existing game modes have to be put on hold to focus on developing the new deathmatch game mode.
ARAM
The recent ARAM changes that were introduced late last year added some complexities to the otherwise outdated and stale game mode. Some things were received well by the playerbase, such as the new balance changes.
The champion balance in ARAM were more creative in the recent months. The balance team looked outside of the usual stats and took to tweaking other ones like Tenacity and Ability Haste. This reduced the oppressiveness of AoE healing champions like Seraphine or Senna, as well as some poke champions like Senna and Ashe. To this, Riot Maxw3ll said “we're in a better state than we were before the update, but we still have some work left to be done.”
“The map changes, including Frostgates, have been successful in allowing us to pull back on a lot of damage-based balance levers, but we still have more tuning to do. Our goal is to make it so ARAM doesn’t need to be balanced based on pure damage (or healing) numbers alone, so we’re going to continue to work to find other creative ways to buff and nerf champions in the future,” he added.
Speaking of Frostgates, the surveyed playerbase positively received this addition to the map. However, they affected the overall game flow negatively. This is also partly due to the longer death timers as the game progresses, making for slower gameplay when you're over 20 minutes in. This prompted a revert in the death timers as a tentative fix, and Frostgates will probably receive a change if this doesn't “fix” the flow of the game.
The one addition that was the most unpopular out of all the changes were the tower rubble. “We think we changed ARAM more dramatically than we needed to,” wrote Riot Maxw3ll. Their attempt to mend this problem is to “strongly scale back the tower rubble mechanic,” which in itself is quite vague. The other option, however, is more clear in that they might revert the tower rubble mechanic altogether.
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