A new kind of LoL champions’ update. What will it be characterized by and why did the game need something like that?
League of Legends is currently an older production, which, despite its age, is incredibly popular around the world. The game maintains a big number of players practically solely thanks to regular updates, which not only balance the gameplay but over many seasons have significantly improved how the game looks and how the gameplay unfolds.
Fans can take an active part in changing LoL through polls where they can choose a champion to receive a voluminous VGU. Some champions received smaller updates, such as Morgana and Ezreal. There are also ASUs that are also responsible for refreshing LoL characters. What is the said update?
What is ASU?
Rioter Reav3 – Lead Hero Producer has posted an entry on the Riot website where you can learn all about Art and Sustainability Updates (ASU).
League’s personalization team—aka the crew who works on skins, events, and other cosmetics—have started working on a new type of champion update called an Art & Sustainability Update, or ASU. The goal of ASUs is to help bring some of League’s older champions up to our modern quality standards, fix older technical issues, and make it easier to make new skins for those champions in the future.
An ASU is a visual refresh that allows us to bring a champion closer to modern expectations (or sometimes better match their representation in other areas of our IP). As such, these updates won’t heavily reimagine a champion’s lore or have any changes to their gameplay, which you’d normally see with a full VGU. With ASUs, we can fix certain elements of older champions that you’ve given us feedback on over the years—like broken necks and wrists, outdated animations, gameplay clarity improvements, outdated outfits and VO, etc. Also, ASUs are in addition to full VGUs, which the Champion Team will continue doing as usual.
With ASUs, our goal is to update the most critical elements of some of our older champs, that way they’re brought up to our current art and visual standards. This means that the base champion and the oldest skins for that champion will likely undergo the most change, and more recent skins or Legendaries are less likely to be updated.
We hope that by introducing ASUs, we can modernize more of your favorite champions and lay a better foundation for future skins. You can expect to see our first ASU launch later this year.
In short, ASU is a visual upgrade of the hero that doesn’t need gameplay tweaks. Rioter points out that in the case of characters that need it, the creators will look at the lines spoken by the heroes and try to refresh them.
According to the latest statements from the designer, the next roadmap is to appear around the beginning of the coming season. Then there will be more information on the next characters that will go to League of Legends. Rioter also points out that the heroes who were on the VGU list last year still need an update that would include their gameplay as well. Therefore, these characters cannot receive an ASU.
Players have repeatedly mentioned heroes whose gameplay does not differ from current standards, while the visual side has long been asking for changes. The flagship example is Caitlyn, who received a new look for the premiere at LoR. In addition, the character model has been refreshed in TFT (Caitlyn will soon get a visual rework? Riot changed her model into TFT). Will it be one of the first characters to receive an ASU? Fans will probably find out soon.