Thanks to Ahri’s updated gameplay, her play rate and prominence in League of Legends have skyrocketed. However, her visual makeover is still some time off; developers say it will arrive “early next year“.
Ahri’s popularity has increased with the gameplay update she received in patch 12.3. Even while the champion wasn’t completely reworked, the changes given to her have caused more players to favor her hybrid mage/assassin playstyle.
The Nine-Tailed Fox is getting more attention than ever thanks to her popularity as a mid-laner in both casual and competitive play. With more eyes, people will see that she looks dated, as Riot admitted earlier this year in an early preview of the pre-season 2023 modifications in a video.
A fresh Riot developer blog has since given us a more thorough look at Ahri’s visual makeover and confirmed an early 2023 release timeline. There, we received a sneak peek at Ahri.
Ahri ASU update
Ahri’s update falls under the ASU category (Art & Sustainability Update). This basically means that the update is just concerned with modernizing Ahri’s audio and visual components.
However, The Nine-Tailed Fox gameplay upgrade has already been released, unlike certain cosmetic updates and overhauls that also include a significant amount of new backstory and/or gameplay.
Her makeover may appear to be less work than other updates, but it’s crucial to remember that she has 16 skins on top of her base model, making this one of the most significant visual updates for a champion when all the skins that had to be redesigned are taken into account.
The development blog displayed a lot of Ahri’s upcoming upgrades, including cosmetic adjustments, fresh animations, and updated audio and sound effects for her skills.
Ahri’s KD/A ALL OUT skin’s side-by-side comparison shows some of the small modifications and echoes the blog post’s assertion that the ASU is “mainly focused on sustainability, aka making it easier to develop skins.”
We also learned more about the relationship between the League of Legends Ahri and her Ruined King: A League of Legends Story counterpart.
She was one of the primary characters in the LoL spinoff game, and the development site has stated that The Nine-Tailed Fox we know from LoL is from a time following the events of Ruined King.
“After seeing her grow so much over the course of the game, it felt like a waste to revert her back to who she was before,” said Elyse Lemoine, senior narrative writer at Riot Games, addressing their choice in the blog post.
Even while the post gave us a lot of information on her final appearance and the process that went into making her new models and animation rig, the release date is still not entirely certain.
Her release date was listed as “sometime early next year” in the preseason announcement video for her ASU. They’re “going quiet until she’s ready,” the blog post continued, reinforcing the release window.