Riot Games has shared a new Dev Update on their channel discussing Skarner and other upcoming changes. While the video was taken down shortly after it was posted, it provided some interesting insight into what Riot has been working on.
MID-SCOPE AND SKARNER UPDATES
During the video, Rioters Jeremy “Brightmoon” Lee and Andrei “Meddler” van Roon discussed Riot’s plans to release more champion updates in the near future. They are currently focused on mid-scope updates, with an emphasis on improving champions’ gameplay.
“Now that we got Yuumi out of the way, though, you know, she jumped the front of the pack as a bit of a problem in all skill levels across League, we can focus on a few other champions,” said Lee.
Van Roon revealed that Rell, Neeko, and Ivern are the three champions currently being worked on. Riot is planning to improve Rell’s mounting and demounting mechanics, while with Neeko, they are looking to adjust her passive to allow her to transform into things other than champions. For Ivern, usability changes for Daisy are in the works, although specifics have not yet been revealed.
Riot also gave an update on the state of the Skarner VGU, stating that it has been a challenge to decide what to keep or change from his kit. Brightmoon explained that it will take longer than expected for the update to be released, but that a blog update is planned to detail the game design changes, goals, lore updates, and art direction for the updated champion.
NEW SKIN THEMES
Riot is considering introducing new themes for larger events in the near future. One of those will be MSI in May, and the largest Summer Event a few months later.
In the dev update, the two Riot employees also mentioned that Udyr, Mundo, and Shyvana will be getting some love and receiving new skins down the line.
Speaking of new skins, Riot is looking to bring some Wild-Rift-specific skins to the PC version, sometime around July. Star Guardian Orianna, Seraphine, and Senna are the first three, followed by Redeemed Xayah and Rakan later.
The dev team is aiming to bring back the Blue Essence Emporium this summer after it was taken down last year. “It’s not a guaranteed thing, but it’s looking very likely,” said Brightmoon. He also added that it will be similar to last year, but will have lots of back-end changes.
QUICK PLAY WILL BE REPLACING BLIND PICK
Riot’s Game director Pu “Pupulasers” Liu announced that they are looking to introduce a new game mode for League called Quick Play, which will be replacing Blind Pick, as it has been the least popular queue.
“We want to evolve that into Quick Play in order to give you guys what you want about blind pick, in a better way. We’re going to allow you to choose your favorite champion, your favorite role and you’re guaranteed to get at least one of those in your next game. Once you see which one you got, you will jump straight into the game.”
Pupulasers continued by saying that they will be looking to test Quick Play in a few regions in the upcoming months and see if it works.
Lastly, he concluded by saying that 32-bit operating systems will no longer be supported on League, starting from Apr. 4th, and players will have to move to 64-bit in order to play. While it looks like a big deal, according to Pupulasers, the affected player base is only a tenth of a percent (0.1%).
This decision was made to allow the Riot dev team to work on new changes, such as improving security features, anti-cheat and bot detection, thus providing a better game experience.
