Are there a lot of changes coming to LoL? The developers reveal that they have some plans for the coming year.
It’s hard to imagine League of Legends without minions strolling around the map. These are an incredibly important part of the gameplay, as they provide heroes with gold with which to buy needed items.
Riot is considering how it could remake the aforementioned creatures to make the gameplay even more interesting. What is known about the creators’ ideas that were recently revealed?
Minion changes on Summoner’s Rift
It’s currently about halfway through the 2023 season of League of Legends. Season 13 brought a revised Chemtech Dragon and new jungle pets to freshen things up in the long-running MOBA game from Riot Games.
There’s still a lot of work to be done in the current LoL season – after all, there are more than a dozen updates left. But that hasn’t stopped the developers from thinking of plans for 2024, which include various experiments with existing mechanics.
Chief gameplay designer Riot Axes spoke, among other things, about the current state of shooters and fighters. He also touched on what the company is working on in terms of the longer perspective. The Rioter noted that the current set of tools they have for balancing classes is too limited. Axes mentioned that simple changes, such as bringing back Teleport, do not improve the game, but instead introduce a new pool of problems that designers need to solve.
We think both classes are coming to a more or less stable state, but there’s definitely further fine tuning to be done. In the longer term, I anticipate significant changes to the Mythic item structure for both item systems, and one of the opportunity spaces we’re considering for Preseason (no promises to ship anything, but we’re exploring it) is towards creating some better ability to tune roles more holistically against each other—for example, differentiating the minions in each lane. We’re finding our current set of tools to be a little too limited and we don’t think simple reverts to things like Teleport make the game better, they just make the game have a different set of problems.
As you can see, due to the limited set of tools, Riot is looking for new ways to balance classes in a more comprehensive way. One potential solution being explored is changing the minions.
In the statement quoted above, we can read that for the time being the developers are only considering certain solutions and are not promising anything. “Diversifying the creatures in each lane” sounds very interesting and would certainly strongly influence the gameplay. However, it’s hard to say more, as these are only plans and Riot has not given any specifics. It is unknown whether the developers’ ideas will be implemented at all.