Aurelion Sol will receive a new type of rework. In the nicely crafted words by Riot, you can read that the character will actually be deleted. Only its appearance will remain, and everything else will be new.
Aurelion Sol is a great hero in many ways. Players alike praise its character, great looks and dialogue lines. However, he has a serious problem with his skill set.
The community does not like him and many people simply quit playing with this character after their first matches. Despite the efforts of the developers and a few minor modifications, it was not possible to achieve satisfactory results and his skills are not to be reworked rather than built anew. Now the developers are telling players what they will focus on and when to expect a new version of the Star Dragon.
Aurelion’s biggest problem is about to be solved
The Star Architect is not such a new character anymore. He was released 6 years ago and has had a serious problem ever since. While he looks really good graphically and his character is often considered one of the best written, he is not playable. There is even a popular opinion among the community that you either are either his one trick or never play him.
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The creators officially admitted that this element of the hero did not live up to the expectations of the fans:
Back when we announced the Star Forger, a lot of you were super hyped for his release. So hyped that he had one of our highest purchase rates on day one. Tons of you really loved and wanted to play a gigantic, arrogant star dragon. Unfortunately, we didn’t really deliver on a gameplay kit that matched that excitement, as most of you dropped him after just a few games. His playrate plummeted to one of the lowest in the game, where he has been ever since. That said, he still comes up in the top ten most liked visuals whenever we do champion surveys, even though his gameplay always ends up near the very bottom of the list.
Despite many attempts to fix him, such as changing the Celestial Expansion (W) and improving the performance of other skills, it was not enough to encourage players to choose this hero. Ultimately, the popularity of the dragon fluctuates around 0.9%. This puts him in the second-worst place right after Skarner (0.8%), who won the full rework poll, and early work on this project was underway.
Ultimately, although subsequent minor adjustments were taken into account, this form of improvement was abandoned.
We’ve tried some small tweaks to ASol, but when we discussed what we should do to help him out, we came to the consensus that we should just start his gameplay over from scratch.
We didn’t think patching up his kit with small changes would deliver on his promised thematic fantasy, so we decided to try a new type of champion update: a Comprehensive Gameplay Update or CGU.
Now he’s got a skill rework to help him out, called CGU (Comprehensive Gameplay Update), which hasn’t happened in League of Legends until now. The age of the game and the number of characters released show how weak he is. In short, Riot will remove Aurelion Sol and add him anew using only his appearance. There won’t be a single skill left.
The goal of a CGU is to update gameplay for two types of champions: Those that have high quality art and narrative, but whose gameplay just doesn’t quite deliver on their fantasies, or champions with more complicated gameplay issues that can’t be solved by changing one or two abilities (like the small adjustments to Tahm Kench were able to accomplish). We then rebuild the champion’s kit from scratch with the same model, theme, and narrative. ASol will be the first champion to go through a CGU, and if you’re happy with the results we may take a look at other champions that fall into these categories in the future.
In practice, it resembles a rework of Urgot or Sion, but without the visual changes of the hero himself. The two above-mentioned characters have undergone a full rework, and with ASol, the creators want to focus only on the skill set itself, while “keeping his current identity”.
We want to emphasize his dragon fantasy, as we don’t think he currently delivers on that part of his persona very well. We also think our new take on his star forging gameplay will be both spectacular to see and more intuitive to play. While things can always change, we’re currently targeting some time at the end of the year to get a new and improved Star Dragon in your hands. We really hope he’ll finally deliver on the fantasy you all were excited about many moons (stars?) ago.
So if all goes according to plan, Aurelion Sol players will start the 2023 season with a new version of their favorite champion. Perhaps there will be more of his mains and Riot Games will be able to finally announce success 7 years after champion’s release.