League Of Legends with Gamedev Relay!
Diving even deeper into the nerdy details with Alex Stasenko
Welcome everyone to an exciting Cross Post with the talented Alex Stasenko from Gamedev Relay! We are both very passionate about video games and their industry and realized that we’ve never covered a video game adaption for Feats N’ Faults. We had to change that. To celebrate the new season of Arcane coming out, we are working on a new series that will take a deep dive into everything League of Legends. As a fledgling fan with no experience in the game, Alex is the perfect choice to break down this wonderful game.
Once you finish this article, please show Alex some love and subscribe to his page. It is the best video game news feed on this platform, and I know your support would mean the world to him. Plus, there is a special Feats N’ Faults post on his feed that you won’t want to miss.
Take it away Alex Stasenko!
Disclaimer: Mind you it’s my first review of a game (well technically second), so bear with me here 😅
The Gameplay
Let’s start with the basics. We are talking about a MOBA game, so you should expect the usual spiel, three lanes and 5 heroes on each side, protecting a base and some sort of superstructure. When your team destroys it, congratulations, you have won.
League of Legends (or LoL) has also all your “favourite” free-to-play features (like battle pass 🤮) among several game modes. The normal games where you play just for the sake of losing your hair, the ranked mode where you can imagine yourself being like a regular cyber athlete, ARAM where you and your team play as random heroes on a map with only 1 lane (very fun 😁).
There were also 2 other modes that were discontinued some time ago. RIP Dominion and Twisted Treeline 😢
But what makes this game so unique is that unlike Dota 2 (the main competitor) is the differences between micro and macro mechanics.
It’s argued that LoL is more micro-focused. You have your standard lanes, your additional spells that you pick every single time, a lot of different objectives on the map and the list goes on.
While in Dota there is A LOT more map mobility, fights in Dota tend to last longer, and different consumables (e.g. Smoke of Deceit which, when used, makes all allies in an AoE invisible until you are within a certain range of an enemy hero or tower). This means you can make plays around the map together without being seen by wards.
In Dota buildings are much stronger late game and don't go down in 3-4 hits and for all death timers are longer there is a buyback mechanic where you can spend a lot of gold to instantly respawn. Both these mean that teams are much more likely to take risks late game as they can either force the enemies’ buybacks or rely on their own. Whereas in League if you lose a team fight late game you've straight up lost and can only watch the enemy charging down your superstructure.
Personally, I played both of them extensively, they both 23
Short Premise
Everything is a bit tricky here as there are two versions, before the reboot that happened in 2014 and after.
Before the reboot, the premise was quite interesting. You were a Summoner, an in-universe political leader commanding champions to fight on the Fields of Justice - for example, Summoner's Rift - to avert a catastrophic war.
However, in 2014 League of Legends suffered a major reboot both in terms of the gameplay and story. Riot Games rebooted the game's fictional setting, removing summoners from the game's lore to avoid "creative stagnation".
Personally, I enjoy what they did with the game itself, but I miss the bigger picture. As of right now, everything seems to be living in its own small bubbles and there’s nothing connecting the dots. Well, except for the Arcade maybe and some details in the bios…
The Story
Ah, my favourite part of any game. This is rather interesting because you don’t see the story in the game as you play essentially the same match over and over.
What you can do is read about it in the bio of your playable character, hear it in their voices in the game and most importantly (another great example of how this game is different from others) you can trigger unique interactions during your matches.
Let’s say you are playing Caitlyn, the sheriff of a city. And your opponent is playing as Jinx, an outlaw who terrorizes the same city. You can hear both of them referencing each other in their occasional lines and you get a unique passive (that doesn’t do anything gameplay-wise) for how many times you caught Jinx.
There are quite a lot of characters that function that way. Some even grant unique buffs that affect gameplay, but they are very hard to obtain.
And now, with the game transforming into a series that will probably have at least a few additional spinoffs, the world of Runeterra has never been bigger (even after the fact that devs keep rewriting it).
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The Evolution
As with any game that’s been active for years, League of Legends changed drastically. And if you were ever to play the old version of the game, you probably wouldn’t recognize it.
Once the game started becoming increasingly popular, Riot Games decided to step it up a notch as the graphics were the biggest point of contention between LoL and Dota 2. I still remember when back in the days I was arguing with a guy about the fact that the gameplay of League of Legends was far better and far more rewarding and how the graphics could be overlooked.
The Community
With the game evolving, the community started growing and evolving with it.
Just an interesting piece of data, but according to some sources, the game has around 125 million monthly active users. Which is H-U-G-E! Of course it’s hard to estimate as only Riot Games has access to the real data and we will have to take into consideration that one person could have multiple accounts and such, but it’s definitely one of the most popular games of our time.
I have to say one thing though, once a community reaches a certain point, it becomes exponentially more toxic towards newcomers. For example, right now I can’t imagine a veteran player being at least somewhat friendly toward a person who just starting to play this game. But back when I started, I actually made some friends who were playing with me despite the fact that I barely understood what I was doing on the map.
Also, I have to say, the amount of people who are now attending tournaments and conventions dressed up as LoL champions is just mindblowing! Almost everywhere you look you can see something from this game, even if it’s just a hat or something.
What Remains
At the end of the day, as much as I hate how much time I spent on this game and how much stress it gave me, it’s certainly one of my favourites.
But when I think about it, I don’t remember the game itself. I remember when I was reluctant to play this game, my friends spent days trying to convince me to play it. I remember how embarrassing it was to lose my first game which was 1v1 with my best friend’s girlfriend (she was playing the first time as well 😅). I remember how we fought with this same best friend about some in-game nonsense and haven’t talked for days and then we were joining the game again. I remember when we were staying all night playing and laughing for a few days in a row (we lost 90% of these games). And I remember almost missing an important date just because the game was getting longer than I anticipated 😅.
And these old and new memories of the experiences that go hand in hand with this game is what keeps me coming back for more.
Legends never die! ✊
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Have a great week!
Alex from Gamedev Relay
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It's always been intimidating to give this a try. However, after reading about it, it reminds me a lot of my time with Destiny/Overwatch. Yeah the fans can be a bit toxic at times but even through all the losses it is the laughs you make with your friends that you'll remember. I'll have to finally give it a shot.