Developer teams are taking extra time to perfect everything in the wake of the latest hack.
Game delays are bad, especially when you’ve been waiting for League of Legends champion fixes for a while; Somewhere in there, the main Ahri lines – myself included – and the elusive Aurelion Sol players (I know you exist, and See you) crying in chat. However, the paid patches are a blessing in disguise. I’m glad the league’s dev team didn’t fall into a rut after Riot’s latest hack.
Discussions about challenging game studio cultures have become more prevalent in recent years as younger generations of developers have begun to embrace a healthy work-life balance. priorities changed; Employee well-being within deadlines has become a hallmark of excellent development studios. Putting people first makes the company a better place to work. Big companies like CD Projekt Red and Naughty Dog have had problems with crunch in the past when faced with approaching deadlines, and business often suffers from that, as we saw with the initial launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
Which is why it bodes well for both the health of the league team and the game itself that Ahri’s visual overhaul and Aurelion Sol’s kit rework have been put off a time or two. Developer teams that don’t force hard deadlines are perfectly capable of putting out complete games, as seen in Supergiant Games’ Hades or Insomniac Games’ Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. League patches are really no different: when working with a game that has many distinct moving parts, the more time a team has to get things right, the fewer balancing issues they need to work out in the future.
These projects are no small feat, either. Ahri, a fan-favorite midway assassin and member of the League’s K/DA group, is receiving an ASU, or Art and Sustainability Update. Released in 2011, Ahri is one of the older heroes in the league, and it definitely shows in its retro graphics and patches (Popstar Ahri in particular is an absolute nightmare). They’re updating hero rigging, skin spray art, voice lines, and in-game effects to ensure that her character design remains relevant and compatible with their new heroes. ASUs are essential to league health, ensuring that champions don’t feel outdated or unrewarding to play. It’s an important part of maintaining pool diversity in a game of 162 playable characters and counting.
A more ambitious Aureleion Soul update; While its visuals are great and up to date, since it was released in 2016, the hero line-up leaves a lot to be desired. Despite the relatively high win rate of those who play for him, he is only picked in an estimated 1.3% of league games. It’s been altered quite a bit in the past in an effort to bring it to the meta, but this time around, Star Forger reworks the entire suite with all new abilities.
It’s almost like introducing a whole new hero to the meta: while the League team doesn’t need to worry about a new character design or lore, they do have to focus on its expansion potential, and how its abilities synergize with other heroes. his abilities, and making sure he didn’t turn into an absolute monster to play against.
It will take a little longer before we see these changes fully implemented in the game, but I am more than happy to wait. As excited as I am to see what Arcana Ahri looks like with the new animation, I’m glad the developer teams are taking the extra time to perfect everything in the wake of the latest hack. There’s plenty of Champions League to enjoy in the meantime – the delay certainly won’t keep me from the Rift.
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