Riot Games recently addressed the question of why they are hesitant to port champion models from Wild Rift to the PC version of League of Legends.
Despite improvements in LoL, especially in graphics and visuals, Riot has maintained a commitment to updating older champions to meet the latest standards through processes such as VGU, ASU, VFX updates, and minor enhancements. However, the release of these updates tends to be time-consuming.
Why porting Wild Rift champions to League of Legends is impractical
In response to a player’s inquiry during an AMA session, Riot Lexical explained the impracticality of directly transferring models from Wild Rift to the League PC version. Drawing an analogy with early-day in Google translation, she highlighted the inaccuracy in such a process and emphasized the importance of rewriting content from scratch for optimal results.
Furthermore, Lexical pointed out challenges related to resource allocation and team dynamics. She explained that the artistic discipline is often stretched thin, with team members already committed to ongoing projects.
Allocating an artist from one team to another for unrelated work is not a straightforward solution. Lexical cited an example from the release of Arena, where a lack of VFX was attributed to the absence of an available VFX artist during that particular timeframe.
Addressing the dynamic nature of artistic teams, Lexical noted that artists frequently join and leave, causing disruptions in project timelines. When an artist departs, there is a considerable delay as a replacement is trained, impacting the overall workflow.
Lexical concluded that the intricate nature of these challenges, including resource constraints and team dynamics, contributes to the time-consuming nature of updating champions in League of Legends and underscores why a direct port from Wild Rift is deemed impractical by Riot Games.