Ask Riot Discusses New Summoner Spells, Returning Game Modes

In the most recent edition of the League of Legends Ask Riot session, the team behind the game tackled a few more questions about the current state of the game that players had on their minds.

Previously, Ask Riot tackled the pressing question of why there were not more “sexy male champions” in the game to compete with their female counterparts. The Riot Games team answered a couple of questions regarding the future of champions in the game and whether or not more attractive male champions would be added. The employees answering the players’ questions wrapped up that discussion by saying that there were already some pretty attractive male champions in the game, but their main focus was appealing to different players’ preferences.

“Varus, Taric, Ezreal and the newly released Rakan come to my mind as some of the sexy bois we currently have in the game,” said REAV3, the Lead Producer of champions. “Even Jhin probably has a certain dark, mysterious allure to some.”

While the topics they cover during Ask Riot range greatly, the male champion edition was certainly more focused on aesthetics as opposed to gameplay and history in the game. This time, however, players hoped to find some answers regarding the return of some of their favorite game modes. Rotating game modes have been talked about quite a bit recently after the apparent success of Dark Star: Singularity, and it brought up more questions about previous successes.

Players also inquired as to whether there was any possibility of seeing additional summoner spells added to the game in the future as well as inquiring about the history of some of the items in the game. We’ve taken the questions asked by players and broken down the Rioters’ responses to see how they feel about the current state of the game and where it might be headed.

New Summoner Spells

The current summoner spells in the game allow for fantastic combinations and plays from champions that otherwise wouldn’t be able to make such maneuvers, but the Rioters did acknowledge that there are some spells that certainly take priority over the others.

The biggest question that players had concerning the state of the spells is whether or not there would be any additional spells added in the game’s future. Before anyone gets their hopes up, they did say that that’s not something that they’re particularly focused on right now. However, they didn’t completely rule out the possibility of more spells being added eventually.

Ghostcrawler, the Design Director for League of Legends, explained the team’s position on the state of summoner spells by explaining how they felt about the ones that are already in the game. 

Spells like Flash and Teleport can be game changers,” Ghostcrawler said. “Things like Exhaust and Ignite are fairly interesting and do get used, but they aren’t the source of big plays like Flash and Teleport are. We’re okay with that space as long as they are relevant.”

He went on to admit that other spells such as Barrier and Clarity don’t receive quite as much play and that they sometimes struggle to remain relevant in the game’s shifting meta. One of the spells that wasn’t touched on was Cleanse, but it’s likely that there won’t be too many changes made to the spell given its usefulness for shrugging off crowd control, a tool that’s especially popular in the mid lane.

Ghostcrawler closed out that question by saying that they’ve made changes to spells in the past that didn’t quite work with the game, and they’d be open to adding new spells later on. However, he said that it’d have to be a pretty unique idea for a spell in order to compete with the current ones.

Black Market Brawlers

Black Market Brawlers was one of the most creative game modes to be added to the growing list of game modes in League. It tied in with the lore event known as Burning Tides when Gangplank had his dramatic makeover into the champ that he is now. Players fortified their team by using another in-game currency to recruit some specialized minions, and the game modes also introduced several new innovative items, some of which eventually made their way into the store for non-Black Market Brawler games.

With such an interesting game mode on the table, fans of the mode have often clamored for its return to the rotating game mode queue. Sadly, it doesn’t look like that’ll be the case for the Bilgewater event, as L4t3ncy, the Lead Designer for rotating game modes, was quick to shoot down the idea of the game mode returning when a player asked if they’d ever see the game mode again.

“Probably not,” L4t3ncy said, quickly dashing the hopes of seeing it again.” Black Market Brawlers had some unique ideas in it but suffered from a split-identity crisis. Having both the minion customisation and the new items side by side was just too much going on inside a single mode. Lessons learned.”

That’s not to say that the ideas that were implemented in the game mode won’t find their way into future modes, however. A part of the mode may come back later, but the team assured readers that it would be only one of the elements, not both. The emphasis of a new game mode would either lean towards the new items or customizing your own minion army, but regardless, it won’t be in the same way that Black Market Brawlers was implemented.

Items And Their Lore

The final question that players hoped to have answered concerned one of the driving factors that creates relationships between players and champions and makes the preference of factions such as Demacia and Ionia so divisive. The lore of all of these elements contributes greatly to the history and future of ideas that are implemented in League of Legends, and each piece of lore is carefully crafted — and often updated — by a team of writers who handle the history of League. 

That being said, there’s one aspect of the game that doesn’t get a great deal of emphasis on lore, and that’s the items. The question posed to the Rioters inquired as to whether the team would look to expand on the items’ lore in the future, and the answer from Reverendanthony, the Senior Writer for the Worldbuilding team, gave hope that we may soon see some history behind the items.

“Short answer: Yes,” the Rioter answered succinctly. 

In a more lengthy answer, he expanded on his stance by saying that they’re looking into how exactly is the best way to implement the lore into the game without it being obtrusive. He added that when you’re about to engage in a chaotic fight and you’re making some last-minute purchases before departing the base, the last thing that a player would want to see is a lengthy lore description cluttering the screen and distracting them from getting back into the fight. He ended by saying adding lore to items is definitely something they want to tackle later on down the line once they find the best ways to implement it.

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