One thing that few people notice is that the brush, the terrain of the map of League of Legends has changed little over the years, even after the image upgrade, their position is not too new, there are maybe the top lane has 3 dust instead.
So in the pre-2020 season, a lot of ideas related to “changing the terrain” were put forward and one of them was the First Blood Brush.
The backdrop for every League match has stayed pretty constant for the past 10 years. There are three lanes, a jungle, Baron pit, dragon pit, and two bases. You know Baron spawns at 20 minutes, some dragons appear, someone runs it down, better jungler wins. The only map variance from game to game was “Which type of dragon is gonna spawn next?”, but even that didn’t really change the way you played. It had been years since the Summoner’s Rift saw any monumental changes, and the SR team was excited to play in that space (and at that scale) once more.
So in early 2019, the Summoner’s Rift team—aka the group of devs that work on balance, preseason, and all of the other juicy Summoner’s Rift changes—met once a week to brainstorm ways to change the Rift. At that point, nothing was off-limits and every idea was worth exploring, as long as it’d make each game feel unique without completely overhauling everything players knew about the game.
“This stage of game design isn’t necessarily focused on finding what’s good,” explains senior development manager Olivier “Riot Kazdoo” Ged. “It’s to focus in on what’s bad and failing fast. We want to get that out of the way. Then we can go back to what’s good and ask ourselves why it’s good.”
Here’s some of the stuff the team got out of the way.
For example, if a player is kill by a turret, a bush will be there to make the laning phase safer and easier to farm.
However, this idea has created a mixed effect because “it does not bring great feeling to the opponent,” said Daniel “Rovient” Leaver, a member of the development team.
Besides, Riot also wanted to have more grass on the map when the soldier was destroyed. But it did not come true because everything would become very confusing and chaotic.
“We had an idea to improve upon first blood,” shares game designer Daniel “Riot Rovient” Leaver. “The way it worked was if you died, brush would spawn at that location. But it ended up kind of weird. For example, if you died under your own tower, you had this lovely brush you could safely farm under tower from. It didn’t feel great to play against that.”
Another early iteration granted players the ability to destroy walls by destroying towers. And another covered the base in brush once inhibitors fell. While these hit some of the goals the team had, they left the map feeling overly chaotic and took control away from players—something the team wanted to avoid.
The team was also interested in exploring new ways to fight against the existing monsters in League.
With the need to make the jungle monsters a more important part, greater impact on how players control the map, Riot has launched a few experiments. Including Baby Dragon and buff “Enlist” to create a push on the road like a storm.
It has the same mechanism of action as the Zz’Rot that were removed in Pre-Season 2020, when jungle monsters will follow soldiers on the way with the ultimate goal of destroying the Nexus Main House. More specifically, players with Baron buff can win Red and Blue and other jungle monsters to threaten enemy structures.
And one of the strangest experiences that cannot reach League of Legends players is Roaming Baron.
They tried creating smol baby dragons that gave players smol baby buffs (or big, game-changing ones). Another exploration allowed champions with Baron buff to “enlist” the services of defeated jungle camps to form an undead super army. And in another iteration, Baron would leave his pit, seeking fights if he was ignored for too long—essentially shouting, “1v1 ME BRO! IT’S ALL BARON PIT NOW!”
Although Baron is already quite strong in its lair. But getting ambushed by the biggest monster on the map, Summoner’s Rift in the grass, is definitely the most memorable experience of all.
“The problem was that fighting against non-players in League is really only good if you’re crushing them,” says lead game designer Mark “Riot Scruffy” Yetter. “The game’s about fighting players, so enlisting creatures didn’t really work.”
No matter what the team explored, they kept coming back to dragons. Something about them just felt… right. Dragons already existed in League. Players knew what they did. And their current buffs weren’t super exciting. So could the team use dragons to hit their initial goals? And what could they use from the designs from the great purge to make that happen?
By following this approach, the team was able to narrow in on an amalgamation of the terrain changes and the PvE elements to create the core of the Elemental Rift update. The map wouldn’t change constantly, players wouldn’t have to fight dumbed-down monsters, and there wasn’t a bunch of new stuff to learn. The game wouldn’t be reinvented—there’s no time to re-learn the basics in the climb to Challenjour.
But before the team started creating a bunch of new maps, they needed to make sure they weren’t completely insane. Four versions of SR with unique gameplay-impacting designs? Players would love it, right? …Right?