League of Legends Shares First Look at New Tutorial

League of Legends is getting a new tutorial with Riot Games now sharing a first look at what the [...]

By Tanner Dedmon

League of Legends is getting a new tutorial with Riot Games now sharing a first look at what the new onboarding experience will look like.

In a developers post titled "New Player Experience," Riot Games addressed the tutorial that's been long outdated and what its plans are to better welcome newcomers to League. The announcement follows a confirmation from weeks ago that said an updated tutorial was in the works. Acknowledging that the onboarding experience for League had been "pretty lackluster" according to Riot Games' Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street.

"League has been a really unusual case because it grew much faster than anyone anticipated, despite having a pretty lackluster onboarding experience. The typical way a lot of us learned how to play League was that our friends brought us in, told us what we needed to worry about now, and explained to us what we could safely ignore for the moment. Essentially, the community was League's onboarding."

Whether the info was learned through Discord, the League boards, Reddit, or a nearby friend who's basically clicking for you, it's true that the onboarding experience for League has been largely community-driven. But with 140 champions, tons of items, and many more abilities to educate yourself on, there's a lot to digest for new players. For most players who are already committed to learning more about League through Twitch or other areas of the community, it's easier to make sense of everything, and Riot Games wants to extend a similar opportunity to new players.

"We want to take the same approach with new players," Riot Ghostcrawler said. "We want them to understand why the game is fun, and then hopefully they'll spend the effort to learn the millions of things they need to learn in order to get better at playing."

Citing Mario games as strong examples of a series with a welcoming onboarding setup, Riot Ghostcrawler said that players might be surprised to see what's not included in the new League tutorial as opposed to what is included. The video above shows one of three different tutorials that Riot Games is planning on releasing for new players, tutorials that will encompass intro bots, co-op games, and PvP. The plans don't stop there though with Riot Games working to improve other aspects of the onboarding experience as well.

"Long term, there's a lot more we'd like to do, assuming these changes are even successful. We'd like to have an option to let experienced players skip over the tutorial, which has the added benefit of new players being placed with other new players in their earlier games. We'd like to make it easier for you to bring friends into the game. We'd like to delay steps like choosing a Summoner name. And we'd like to take on some really difficult problems, like decreasing the time it takes for an initial download."

A timeframe for when this new tutorial will be released was not given.

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