Riot Games has announced a reboot of the storyline for its popular MOBA League of Legends. This is being done to ensure the action isn’t inhibiting the potential plots that Riot wants to tell.
As Tommy Gnox of the narrative team wrote, “In the early days of League, we created a fictional background that would justify how players could control champions during games. We came up with concepts like Summoners, Fields of Justice, an Institute of War, and indeed, the League of Legends itself – all in an attempt to provide fictional context for in-game action.
“After a while, these early choices began to create unexpected problems. Every new champion needed a reason to join and remain in the League, and as their number grew, the net result was that over time the world started to feel, well, small, and eventually less interesting.
“The institutions we’d designed fostered creative stagnation, limiting the ways that champions, factions and Runeterra itself could grow and change. Furthermore, the very idea of all-powerful Summoners made Champions little more than puppets manipulated by powers. The background we’d created to explain in-game action was ultimately restricting the potential narrative development of the game’s defining characters.”
So now there’s going to be more to plot than simply justifying why these characters are fighting each other. “Essentially, it means that the game and story aren’t one-to-one copies of each other. League as a game is about creating awesome gameplay, while League as a story is about creating deep, vibrant characters and factions inhabiting an expansive world. We don’t want to limit story because of gameplay, just like we wouldn’t limit gameplay because of story – we want both of them (and all the other elements of League) to have the freedom to be as great as they possibly can be,”