[[{“value”:”
League of Legends Classic is coming to an end. As noted in a recent update, players will be able to queue up matches through Season 3 before Classic gets put “back in its box.” And while this news might not be surprising to some–it didn’t take long to notice that the majority of League’s playerbase either quickly decided that the modern modes were more appealing or outright ignored Classic altogether–I imagine this is a tough pill to swallow for Riot. That’s especially true when one considers how much work went into resurrecting this older version of the hit MOBA.
Earlier this year, I spoke with game designer Brian Feeney, senior game designer David Turley, and senior animator Einar Langfjord about that work. According to the developers, there were internal debates about what should or shouldn’t be included in Classic from the start; as they walked me through just a few of those elements, it became clear the team was fighting an uphill battle from the game’s inception. And that’s before considering how League fans would respond to these decisions.
For starters, with how many iterations of League there are, the team had to carefully consider what would resonate with both new and returning players. Strictly adhering to the oldest version of League wouldn’t work; the Classic public betas showcased how today’s fans have a better understanding of both League of Legends and MOBAs in general, making the oldest version feel limited to the point of near-obsolescence.
“When you give characters who multiplicatively scale, and their damage goes exponential with getting more items, and players are better at getting more items, those characters [become] much better than they were historically,” Feeney said.
Turley suggested, then, that the team should start with some variation of the game’s original 40 champions, but wasn’t sure of which versions to include. “I think in all but one case we chose right, and like during our public beta, we quickly pivoted,” he said. Eventually, they landed on 60 starting champions, made up of both original and hand-picked characters. The idea was to have a decent sized roster that felt balanced despite the skill level of a given player.
Following these initial decisions, the team focused on ridding the game of elements that didn’t age well. However, too big of changes would mean sacrificing the “Classic” part of League Classic. Turley mentioned this when he talked about how newer features found their way into League Classic.
“In a lot of cases, the game is identical or [so] close that no one’s going to be able to discern [the difference], but there are just better ways of doing things now.” Turley used the purchasing of wards as an example. Since newer players didn’t like using money that could be spent on upgrading their builds to buy wards, he gave them a free, yet weaker option. “One thing I added in 2014 was trinkets. Everyone had their own little durable item that would drop a ward for a little bit of time,” he said. Turley felt adding this sort of thing to League Classic was a boon, despite being a newer mechanic.
Yet the most difficult part of League Classic’s development was the process of retrieving the assets needed to resurrect this version of League. The task was so difficult, in fact, that Langfjord joked about feeling more like an archeologist than a senior animator.
“You just go to old files and you hope that nobody deleted them. You go in and see, ‘What did they actually leave? How clean were people when they were backing up a character?’” Langfjord then elaborated on how, even if a character wasn’t lost, it might not have met the standards for the game. “We [couldn’t] bring back old Scion and plop them in the game. We [had] to rebuild him.”
This process sometimes meant finding old animation files to serve as a foundation. Other times, Langfjord would have to make a legendary skin to mimic a character’s gameplay, making it look the way it did years ago. In the cases where character files were completely deleted–due to changes in code or improper storage practices–he’d try using Riot’s file-management system to go through the game’s development timeline. The goal was to find the point where a character existed, and pull whatever he could to copy as a reference. Yet in the “worst cases where there was nothing to pull from,” Langfjord explained, he simply had to “eyeball and fake it.” Langfjord stated that he had to do this for minions, jungle creeps, and even some aspects of the map as well.
“One thing we didn’t take into account was the position of the sun on the map,” he explained. “Apparently, it had been changed to more of an orange hue now in the modern game, because we were going to simulate actual sunlight. We weren’t really thinking of the light as much when we initially started [Classic]. So, a lot of people felt like the map looked very different initially.” The team had to eventually go back and change the game’s lighting so that the map visually felt like it did back in the day.
It’s apparent that a lot of work went into getting League Classic up and running, not to mention balanced. Towards the end of our chat, the devs mentioned how they were using fan feedback to help determine where the game would go in the future. Everyone was passionate about bringing to life the MOBA they initially fell in love with. Unfortunately, that passion wasn’t enough to convince fans to stick around.
League Classic was largely seen as a cool retro option to visit here and there, but nothing that would replace the current iteration of the MOBA. This was especially true for players who weren’t pleased with the starting champions; though folks on Reddit argued about what exactly went wrong during the game’s development, nearly everyone agreed that it would’ve benefited from having the entire Classic roster at launch.
There was also the notion that Riot just wasn’t doing enough. Despite the frequent updates that introduced “new” champions, addressed balancing issues, and fixed bugs, the team was unable to appease its players. The absence of options like a ranked mode–something players had been asking for since launch–reinforced this. Even after Riot introduced the council vote system, which gave players another means of shaping the game, Classic still struggled to resonate with fans. The prevailing sentiment? The game was always missing something important.
It’s hard to nail down exactly what went wrong with League Classic. While Riot certainly did a lot to make the game work, their efforts didn’t translate into more queued matches. The smaller roster, missing features, and other issues pushed too many fans away. That said, it would’ve been great if the team were given more time to cook–especially considering how meaningful the project was for them.
“I’ve been working on League now for eight years,” Langfjord told me. “One of the things that was really cool when I joined [League Classic] early on was [that] I recognized this feeling of the game. I didn’t even know I’d been missing it.”
I could say the same. Though I didn’t spend as much time in League Classic as I thought I would, I did enjoy playing with friends when I could. Thankfully, despite not being a permanent option anymore, it’ll return as an event mode sometime in the future. Its current iteration, however, will cease to exist come January 2027.
“}]]
[[{“value”:”League of Legends Classic is coming to an end. As noted in a recent update, players will be able to queue up matches through Season 3 before Classic gets put “back in its box.” And while this news might not be surprising to some–it didn’t take long to notice that the majority of League’s playerbase either quickly decided that the modern modes were more appealing or outright ignored Classic altogether–I imagine this is a tough pill to swallow for Riot. That’s especially true when one considers how much work went into resurrecting this older version of the hit MOBA.
Earlier this year, I spoke with game designer Brian Feeney, senior game designer David Turley, and senior animator Einar Langfjord about that work. According to the developers, there were internal debates about what should or shouldn’t be included in Classic from the start; as they walked me through just a few of those elements, it became clear the team was fighting an uphill battle from the game’s inception. And that’s before considering how League fans would respond to these decisions.
For starters, with how many iterations of League there are, the team had to carefully consider what would resonate with both new and returning players. Strictly adhering to the oldest version of League wouldn’t work; the Classic public betas showcased how today’s fans have a better understanding of both League of Legends and MOBAs in general, making the oldest version feel limited to the point of near-obsolescence.
“When you give characters who multiplicatively scale, and their damage goes exponential with getting more items, and players are better at getting more items, those characters [become] much better than they were historically,” Feeney said.
Turley suggested, then, that the team should start with some variation of the game’s original 40 champions, but wasn’t sure of which versions to include. “I think in all but one case we chose right, and like during our public beta, we quickly pivoted,” he said. Eventually, they landed on 60 starting champions, made up of both original and hand-picked characters. The idea was to have a decent sized roster that felt balanced despite the skill level of a given player.
Following these initial decisions, the team focused on ridding the game of elements that didn’t age well. However, too big of changes would mean sacrificing the “Classic” part of League Classic. Turley mentioned this when he talked about how newer features found their way into League Classic.
“In a lot of cases, the game is identical or [so] close that no one’s going to be able to discern [the difference], but there are just better ways of doing things now.” Turley used the purchasing of wards as an example. Since newer players didn’t like using money that could be spent on upgrading their builds to buy wards, he gave them a free, yet weaker option. “One thing I added in 2014 was trinkets. Everyone had their own little durable item that would drop a ward for a little bit of time,” he said. Turley felt adding this sort of thing to League Classic was a boon, despite being a newer mechanic.
Yet the most difficult part of League Classic’s development was the process of retrieving the assets needed to resurrect this version of League. The task was so difficult, in fact, that Langfjord joked about feeling more like an archeologist than a senior animator.
“You just go to old files and you hope that nobody deleted them. You go in and see, ‘What did they actually leave? How clean were people when they were backing up a character?’” Langfjord then elaborated on how, even if a character wasn’t lost, it might not have met the standards for the game. “We [couldn’t] bring back old Scion and plop them in the game. We [had] to rebuild him.”
This process sometimes meant finding old animation files to serve as a foundation. Other times, Langfjord would have to make a legendary skin to mimic a character’s gameplay, making it look the way it did years ago. In the cases where character files were completely deleted–due to changes in code or improper storage practices–he’d try using Riot’s file-management system to go through the game’s development timeline. The goal was to find the point where a character existed, and pull whatever he could to copy as a reference. Yet in the “worst cases where there was nothing to pull from,” Langfjord explained, he simply had to “eyeball and fake it.” Langfjord stated that he had to do this for minions, jungle creeps, and even some aspects of the map as well.
“One thing we didn’t take into account was the position of the sun on the map,” he explained. “Apparently, it had been changed to more of an orange hue now in the modern game, because we were going to simulate actual sunlight. We weren’t really thinking of the light as much when we initially started [Classic]. So, a lot of people felt like the map looked very different initially.” The team had to eventually go back and change the game’s lighting so that the map visually felt like it did back in the day.
It’s apparent that a lot of work went into getting League Classic up and running, not to mention balanced. Towards the end of our chat, the devs mentioned how they were using fan feedback to help determine where the game would go in the future. Everyone was passionate about bringing to life the MOBA they initially fell in love with. Unfortunately, that passion wasn’t enough to convince fans to stick around.
League Classic was largely seen as a cool retro option to visit here and there, but nothing that would replace the current iteration of the MOBA. This was especially true for players who weren’t pleased with the starting champions; though folks on Reddit argued about what exactly went wrong during the game’s development, nearly everyone agreed that it would’ve benefited from having the entire Classic roster at launch.
There was also the notion that Riot just wasn’t doing enough. Despite the frequent updates that introduced “new” champions, addressed balancing issues, and fixed bugs, the team was unable to appease its players. The absence of options like a ranked mode–something players had been asking for since launch–reinforced this. Even after Riot introduced the council vote system, which gave players another means of shaping the game, Classic still struggled to resonate with fans. The prevailing sentiment? The game was always missing something important.
It’s hard to nail down exactly what went wrong with League Classic. While Riot certainly did a lot to make the game work, their efforts didn’t translate into more queued matches. The smaller roster, missing features, and other issues pushed too many fans away. That said, it would’ve been great if the team were given more time to cook–especially considering how meaningful the project was for them.
“I’ve been working on League now for eight years,” Langfjord told me. “One of the things that was really cool when I joined [League Classic] early on was [that] I recognized this feeling of the game. I didn’t even know I’d been missing it.”
I could say the same. Though I didn’t spend as much time in League Classic as I thought I would, I did enjoy playing with friends when I could. Thankfully, despite not being a permanent option anymore, it’ll return as an event mode sometime in the future. Its current iteration, however, will cease to exist come January 2027.”}]] Read More GameSpot – All Content
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