Arena, Lee Sin & PvE Mode First-Look | Dev Update - League of Legends

Hey, folks, I'm Andrei, also known as Meddler.

And I'm Jeremy, a.k.a. Riot Brightmoon.

And we're back with another Dev Update with the real Andrei this time.

That’s me.

Today is Tuesday, March 26th. So, as usual,

everything that happens after today won't be covered in this video.

Today, we'll be joined by the Modes team to talk a bit about Arena

and an upcoming mode that we've teased a little bit about earlier this year.

Then we'll talk about the updated Champion Mastery system

and Lee Sin’s visual update.

Here's Eduardo and Selina to talk about modes.

Hey, everyone.

I'm Eduardo “Cadmus” Cortejoso

team lead for Modes on League.

Hi, I'm Selina “ChooChoo Trainnnn” Liu

the delivery lead on the Modes team.

First, we want to give you a little update on Arena.

In its most recent run it was pretty successful.

Though we did see play hours

decrease quite a bit over the course of its run.

We're making some improvements this time to try to give it a little bit

of extra variety and longevity and giving it a longer run as a result

to see how interest holds up over a longer period of time.

Our goal with Arena is to be a great mode to play when

you’re looking to experiment with crazy build ideas,

or you just love to react

to more unpredictable situations —

a mode for the dreamers and the memers.

So in order to do that, when Arena is back on PBE,

you'll be seeing some changes that the team

has been working on for a while.

First, the lobby is going to increase to 16 players.

We want each game of Arena to be a little different from the last,

but still competitive.

So increasing the amount of teams means that you shouldn't be able

to see the same pairs of champions over and over again.

One of the other changes the team has been working on

is a substantial update to the item system.

This version of Arena has a new unique class of items:

Prismatic.

Prismatic items are build defining in a way

that should shape future build decisions

during a match of Arena.

For example,

the Demon King's Crown increases your basic stats by a lot.

But here's the fun part, it increases each round you win,

but if you lose a round, you actually lose more than you gain.

So make sure you become pretty unkillable.

The way in which you also get items has been changed.

You'll no longer only purchase items from the shop,

now you can actually gamble using anvils

to purchase some items at a lower cost...

just a little bit less reliably.

We’re still experimenting with Arena’s next form,

our hope is that you'll tell us how this goes

and how we can continue to grow Arena

into something that you're really excited

to be part of League moving forward.

You can read a lot more

about our goals for Arena and the changes

in a dev blog coming out next week.

All right,

so now onto something we touched upon back in January.

We told you all that we were cooking up

another new game mode,

and we wanted to tell you all a little bit more about it today.

We mentioned that we were making something

that would be a little different

take on League’s core gameplay,

but a bit more chill comparing to Arena.

Well, after months of work, it's time to let you all know that we are

currently working on our first bullet heaven survivor PvE game mode.

In this mode

you'll be able to fight against hordes of enemies by yourself or with friends,

so whether you're looking for a challenge

or you just want to have some fun with friends,

we want this to be something everyone can enjoy.

I know a lot of us, myself included,

have some pretty fond memories of previous

PvE modes like Odyssey or Star Guardian,

but this time we want to make something

markedly different.

And while we aren't quite ready to show you much yet,

we can give you a little bit of an idea

of what this looks like early in development.

Oh,

and did we mention

it'll be coming out alongside our upcoming mid-year event

this year?

Well, that's it for Modes for now, but we hope you'll enjoy

the return of Arena

and we'll be back to share more news about our upcoming

bullet heaven survivor game mode in a future dev update.

Thanks for playing and we'll see you all in Arena.

In January, we shared that we're updating

the Champion Mastery system.

When we announced it, there was some feedback

from you all regarding the changes

and one area feedback

was that it felt bad to grind for titles and then lose them the next split.

And we agree.

So we've made the champion-specific titles permanent.

We’re also changing the way you gain mastery points.

Currently, your mastery score is impacted

by your team's performance overall,

but with this update

it will only account for your own performance

instead of factoring in your team's overall average.

We're also changing how much wins and losses are weighed,

so even if you lose your game,

you'll still progress your Champion Mastery

more than you would today.

We're targeting to launch the system with the changes

we just mentioned, on patch 14.10 on May 15th.

Okay.

It's also been a bit since we talked about Lee Sin,

so we wanted to give you a little update

on how his visual overhaul is going.

As one of our older and most iconic champions,

Lee Sin needed a lot of work

to meet our modern art and tech standards,

while maintaining the feel that his mains

learned and come to love over the years.

This includes things

like rebuilding his model from the ground up,

making his appearance more consistent across all of his skins,

adding new fluid animations and updated visual effects.

And if you leesin closely,

you might even be able to hear quite a few new sound effects.

We also took this opportunity

to address some issues players have noted

over the years with a keen eye on improving gameplay clarity,

we made some bigger changes to how his abilities look

and some skins like Storm Dragon Lee Sin,

reducing the noisiness of his visual effects

and bring the skin’s design more in line with his base skin.

If you want to learn more details about the process,

check out the dev blog that's out now.

You can expect to see Lee Sin’s visual update

to be released with Patch 14.9 on May 1st.

We also have a small, maybe even tiny update on Teemo.

We're targeting his update to be ready later this year with patch 14.20.

All right,

we wanted to give you a quick update

on how we're handling Ranked rewards

now that we have three Ranked splits per year.

Similar to last year,

we plan on having unique Victorious skin per Ranked split.

And since the first split is ending in a few weeks,

we wanted to let you know that Kog’Maw

would be receiving the first Victorious skin of the year.

Then for Split 2 the reward will be Victorious Sona.

Now, if you unlock the Victorious skins for all three splits,

you will also receive

a Victorious border for each of the skins

at the end of the year,

that will display your highest rank across the year.

That's it for today.

As a reminder, please do check out the dev blogs

to learn more about some of the things we discussed.

Also before the next dev update, the Empyrean themed MSI event

will have started in beautiful Chengdu, China.

So make sure you tune in to see which team

punches their ticket to Worlds

and who earns an additional seed for their region.

Also, Arena will have returned,

so check that out with the changes the team mentioned earlier.

Before we wrap, I'd also like to say a few nice things to Jeremy here.

Many thanks for all the work on League

over the years.

It has been greatly appreciated.

Hope you have a wonderful time on sabbatical

and really excited to see what you jump onto

when you get back to Riot afterwards.

Thank you, Andrei.

Thank you, everyone.

It's been an honor and we'll see you soon.

Thank you, all.