League of Legends players who either already consider themselves Volibear mains or those who will be picking up the champion after his rework are getting a free skin. Riot Games announced this week that, once the champion update for Volibear is released, anyone who owns him prior to the rework will get a free skin that showcases one of the scrapped directions for Volibear’s reworked design. Anyone who buys the champion during the patch that the rework is released will also get the skin.
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Riot announced its plans to give away a free skin and previewed what the cosmetic will look like in a dev video released this week. The video focused on the plans for champions in 2020 and touched on Volibear’s rework and how progress on that is coming along.
Part of the video above showed how Volibear had changed since the last Champion Roadmap with Riot “beefing him up a bit” after responding to player feedback. It was then that Riot said it’d be giving away the free skin and explained why.
“We also saw that some players were disappointed that we didn’t take Volibear in a more ‘Eldritch Horror’ direction he has been portrayed as in some of our recent lore,” said Ryan “Reav3” Mireles, lead producer for League’s champion team. “While we thought that direction was interesting and it definitely excited some of us on the team as well, we ultimately felt it didn’t stay true enough to live Volibear.”
The Rioter continued to say the compromise to this is to release a skin for Volibear that immortalizes those themes. Artwork shown below was featured during the announcement to give an idea of what the skin is going for.
“We’re going to take the demonic concept of Volibear across the finish line and make a kind of ‘Eldritch Horror-themed Volibear’ skin,” Mireles continued. “And when Volibear’s VGU launches, we are going to give it to anyone who owns Volibear already or picks him up during his launch patch for free. After that, it will join his collection as a regular, purchasable skin.”
Skins aren’t often given away for free, and Riot said it doesn’t plan on making a habit out of this for future champion updates. Once the availability window to get the skin for free closes, the skin will become part of Volibear’s collection of paid skins. This means that if you’ve got some extra Blue Essence to spare and you think you might ever be even tentatively interested in Volibear, you may as well buy him to get the skin.
There’s currently no release date for when Volibear’s rework will be available.
