League of Legends Dev Explains Reason Behind New Jungle Changes

A prominent developer behind League of Legends at Riot Games has shared more information about the vast changes that will soon be arriving in the Jungle. Heading into 2023, LoL is about to get a number of new tweaks, the most prominent of which impacts Junglers. And while Riot has been toying around with the Jungle role in League of Legends for years, the reason for these new alterations in 2023 is to supposedly make the position a bit easier for newcomers. 

Speaking to ComicBook.com, League of Legends lead game designer Matthew Leung-Harrison opened up more about why Riot feels the need to tinker with Junglers even more. While fans of the Jungle role feel like the position is already being changed too often, Leung-Harrison explained that the team behind the game continues to see concerning statistics when it comes to Junglers. As such, Riot wants to make the Jungling a bit more accessible. 

“Jungle has this very specific problem of being one of the most impactful roles, if not the most impactful role, while being the least popular role. Usually, when we see that profile, it’s pretty bad because it’s like, ‘Oh, well, it’s extremely powerful, but no one likes it.’ We wanted to make sure that if it was going to be that powerful, which we don’t think it should be long term, it should be also pretty satisfying and accessible,” Leung-Harrison said.

One of the ways that Riot is specifically looking to change the Junglers in 2023 involves a new influx of visual cues. Not only will new “pets” be added for Junglers to take with them, but Riot says it wants some of the more unspoken mechanics of the Jungle to become a bit more clear. 

“There’s this myriad of mechanics that are just really hard to understand as a player, and on top of the fact that it’s just lonely. You’re just playing by yourself. And so in order to solve all of those problems, we were like, ‘Well, we can make it more exciting by adding companions. We can visualize a lot of the invisible rules,’” Leung-Harrison explained. “So instead of having a Jungle burn, the pets will attack the camps for you. And so it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, well, we can really clearly visualize why the camps are getting bonus damage from the Jungler and why the Jungle camps are healing you.’ And so it was a combination of all those things that led us to the companion design.”

In the long run, Leung-Harrison hopes that these new alterations to the Jungle role in 2023 will stick around for quite some time. While acknowledging that some changes to Junglers in the past weren’t “worth it”, Leung-Harrison hopes that these upcoming fixes will be the ones that are “going to land.” 

As a whole, these new changes to the Jungle will begin to go live in League of Legends next week when the game’s 2023 Preseason patch rolls out on November 16th.