League of Legends Reveals New Look at Lee Sin’s Overhauled Design

Riot Games has provided an extensive new look at the updated design of Lee Sin in League of Legends. Earlier this year, Riot announced that Lee Sin would be next on tap to receive an ASU (Art and Sustainability Update) for his character model alongside Teemo. As one of the oldest and most popular champions in the game, some LoL fans feared that this redesign could somehow hinder the look and mechanics of Lee Sin’s moves. Now, Riot has provided a better look at this ASU to hopefully ease those worries. 

Riot Games released a new video today talking more about many of the forthcoming changes that will soon be hitting League of Legends. In the video, Riot provided updates on Arena, Champion Mastery, and a new PvE mode in addition to also spotlighting Lee Sin’s altered designs. Riot showed off not only the base model of Lee Sin in this video, but also provided some glimpses of nearly every alternate skin that he has in League of Legends. 

You can watch the video for yourself here:

Along with this video, Riot also released a comprehensive new blog that breaks down just about everything that went into making this new version of Lee Sin. Riot also opened up about how it needed to completely recreate some of the skins for Lee Sin, primarily because his character model now more predominantly features his ponytail. Although this ponytail isn’t seen on every skin for Lee Sin, it’s something that Riot wanted to highlight where it made sense. 

“Well, technically Lee Sin has always had a ponytail, but it was wrapped around his shoulders and essentially glued in place. “So we asked ourselves ‘why not make that element shine?’” the blog said. “Adding in a more dynamic ponytail adds an interesting animation and silhouette element to Lee Sin’s design. On an additional note, there were some gameplay clarity issues that caused Lee to read as Ezreal or other human champions, so giving him a more unique silhouette should help Lee be more clearly Lee to players. This would not only help his base and existing skins, but also future skins have a more distinct silhouette.”

As for when this new iteration of Lee Sin is expected to go live, Riot announced that he’ll release in patch 14.9 for League of Legends. Assuming that there are no delays or changes to this launch, it means that Lee Sin’s new look will roll out for all players on May 1, 2024.