League of Legends’ newest champion, Bel’Veth, is now live in the game for players to jungle with as they fulfil the Void inhabitant’s fantasy of consuming everything around her to grow more powerful the longer the match goes on. This release follows the reveal of Bel’Veth before that gave us our first look at her abilities, launch skin, lore, and other details about the champion. Prior to that launch, ComicBook.com spoke with Ryan Mireles, the lead producer of gameplay for League of Legends, to learn more about Bel’Veth’s origins and the goals Riot had in mind for her.
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As players may have observed in the teasers for Bel’Veth, she’s not quite a full-on creature champion like others from the Void, but she’s not wholly humanoid either. Mireles spoke about player preferences towards human, humanoid, and creature champions last year, and with Bel’Veth, he feels Riot’s struck a nice balance.
“We always keep an eye on player reaction and engagement with our champions and adjust accordingly,” Mireles said. “Bel’Veth is interesting because she isn’t quite a ‘pure’ creature champion, as her ‘angler fish’ identity does make her a bit more relatable than some of our other creature champions. We think we struck a really good balance between delivering a creature champion that could also be generally appealing to those who don’t love monster champions.”
While some players may feel she skews more towards either humanoid or creature territory, Mireles said he wasn’t particularly concerned with which category players feel Bel’Veth fits into since she’s a “great addition to the roster regardless.” He did add that Bel’Veth was originally intended to be more monstrous in design as opposed to creature-like (“monstrous” and “creature” aren’t interchangeable in League’s champion designs), but as development progressed, the creature features grew.
“Bel’Veth wasn’t originally intended to be a creature champion, but again, we’re happy with the balance we struck with her,” Mireles said. “The original goal for Bel’Veth was to be more of a monstrous female champion, something like Renekton, Nasus, or Rengar, but female. Because we looked at our roster and realized that we really didn’t have any monstrous humanoid females, with Lamb (Kindred) being the closest thing. Over development though she pushed further and further into the creature camp.”
Thematically, the “Empress of the Void” was always what Riot wanted to make with Bel’Veth. This angler fish-like design Riot ended up with was intended to double as something that could both interact with humans and humanoid characters while also hailing from the Void. As far as gameplay is concerned, Mireles said Riot hoped to give junglers the same “infinity scaling” playstyle we see in other roles.
“We wanted to bring the ‘infinitely scaling’ fantasy you see with champions like Nasus in the top lane or Veigar in the mid lane to the jungle,” Mireles said. “A lot of players really like these types of fantasies: where you just keep calling and scaling like a ticking time bomb. We were excited about this direction for Bel’Veth because we wanted to get across the theme that the Void was like an inevitable dread mounting in Shurima. Bel’Veth is the Empress of the Void, and like the Void she will inevitably grow strong enough to the point of becoming unstoppable, mimicking the threat of the Void as it mounts overtime in Runeterra.”
Bel’Veth is out now in League, so expect to see her – or ban her – in your next couple of matches until players see how she’ll settle into the meta.
