Our thoughts on identity explorations we’re looking at for later this year and beyond.
Riot Codebear
During the last couple of years or so there had not been any proper changes to the identity customization system. Sure, we have Summoner icons, Borders, Prestige levels, and ranks, but there’s hardly anything that can make an account stand out among the rest. In the recent /dev article published by Riot Codebear, the League of Legends team shared their goals on improving the player’s experience, their reasoning behind these possible changes, and sneak-peeks of the work-in-progress on what League of Legends game client can look like in the future. Today we have brought you a convenient summary of the article, with screenshots and laconic contents of the post. If you want to read the full version yourself, you can find it at the bottom of the post.
Philosophy and resoning behind it
Codebear stated that there’s a lot of options to express yourself, be it your Summoner Icon, Border, your play style, or the champion you consider your signature. All these ways of expressing yourself bucketed into something they call “Progression Identity.” But the current Progression Identity options are not adequately representing all the elements of a League of Legends experience and what makes League special to every type of player. So, with the intent to add more Progression Identity elements in the future to better show off for players, it is essential that each unique feature Riot adds fits with the intended League of Legends style and meets the visual quality bars for both fantasy and clarity.
Goals
- Allow players more agency over their identity so they can show off their personal League brand more clearly
- Refresh some of League’s core identity features alongside new system styles for 2021 and beyond
What’s In the Works
Some of the following adaptations, that can be expected to come later this year and new system content.
Identity Customization
It’s been years since we integrated Ranked Regalia and Prestige Level changes to the League ecosystem, and we still haven’t provided a way to clearly select some of the borders that fit you the best.
By the end of this year, Riot is planning to release full identity customization. This will allow us players to pick the borders, icons, and a few new personalization options being developed alongside our TBD systems.
UI Updates to Gameflow
We should also expect the needed clean-up of the old styles through the game-flow screens: lobby, loading screen, and end-of-game. While the article says that it’s mainly for refreshing and bringing the art style to modern standards, we can only hope for the better optimization of the client as well.
In the below-proposed concept, we see a large influence of the old style in the lobby with map accents and background images remaining relatively untouched. However, Riot is planning to reduce the noise of some of the more distinct elements like unused banners in-game flow screens, and clunky UI to focus on additional Identity components that will allow players to stand out. You can see a lot of new different concepts, like a more fresh display of your current rank, prestige levels, and tokens, all aimed to provide more customization options to the players.
Ranked Emblems and Regalia
In many ways Ranked achievement is seen as synonymous with your core League of Legends identity. The borders and helmets have become a standard for competitive prowess.
As such, Riot’s primary goal is to make sure that the sense of value and achievement is not diminished in the process.
Though simple in approach, removing the texture and faction element allows us to be able to build on top of Ranked tiers further as a core piece of your identity.
Moving more towards the emblematic wing shape will allow for some re-usability across the game experience and combination with other gameplay systems to tell a more complete player story.
Prestige levels
Prestige level borders dropped the ball in terms of customization, mainly because the lack of ability to display them freely. Finally, we will be allowed to select any type of level borders. In addition, the team is exploring possibilities where levels can move in a similar direction to ranked in the form of wing elements that will be transferable across all the places an identity is surfaced.
New Content Types
And for the last, we can also expect some of the additional unique content types to be added in the future, such as:
- Titles
- Identity Crystals
- Banner accents
Conclusion
These changes are rather early in the process. So, to gather the players’ feedback about the current direction of Identity changes, everyone can tag the dev team at @Loldev on Twitter with any thoughts on what we’ve shown here today. Please note, though, that the concepts are pretty much work in progress.
You can read the full article on the official League’s website.
Also don’t miss out on the previous /dev blog, aimed at discussing Queue dodging.
