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GOOD NEWS EVERYONE - Riot has officially announced that the base map, Summoner's Rift, will be getting a complete visual overhaul!
Eager for more? Continue reading for an extensive look at the update to Summoner's Rift, including oodles of screen shots and our first developer blog explaining the goals of the update - Clarity and Readability, Visual Fidelity, Gameplay, Thematic Cohesion, and Performance!
Update to Summoner's Rift Headed to PBE
Here's Riot Aeon with the full announcement regarding the update!"It’s nearly time to push a big update out to PBE and we want to provide context on what’s around the bend. As some of you have guessed, we've been working on an update to Summoner's Rift for a while now. This effort is a big part of our commitment to continually improve League of Legends. We’re focusing on preserving the spirit of Summoner’s Rift and evolving how the map communicates gameplay.
Given the importance of Summoner’s Rift to League of Legends, the fundamental structure of the map remains untouched. Flashable walls, turret ranges, lane sizes, brush interaction and ward placements are exactly as they are on the current map. The intention is to keep moment-to-moment League of Legends the same while improving gameplay through additional clarity.
What clarity translates to is the updated map doing a better job of drawing eyes to the most important information of the moment. When fights break out, the environment should be the background, allowing particle effects and champions to pop off the screen and feed players the crucial data they need to make the right play.
Beyond this, Summoner’s Rift should help players and spectators stay oriented. The western half of the map looks damaged by the emergence of Baron Nashor, while the eastern half feels ancient and overgrown. This, alongside each quadrant’s respective buff, gives every jungle section thoughtfully placed landmarks and subtle color cues. Speaking of the jungle, a cadre of new monsters made Summoner’s Rift home, sporting designs that more accurately reflect their respective gameplay characteristics. For example, the Krugs’ (double golem replacements) rocky exteriors look like the damage soaking mini-tanks they are--and they appear weaker than the hulking Blue Sentinel.
Once the update moves onto the PBE, we will begin sharing a series of features to give you insight into the development of the update. You can expect:
The dev blogs will kick off soon, providing insight into the art and design of the update. We’re also creating a dedicated Community Beta environment for you to give us crucial feedback. On the technical side, new texture rendering tech requires a bit more RAM than the current map, but we’re working on optimizations to mitigate the impact. This update absolutely shouldn’t require you to upgrade your PC (or Mac) when it launches to live.
- Dev blogs written by artists, designers and producers on the team
- Live Q&A sessions with the developers
- PBE patch notes with the latest developments
Even when this update ships to live we’ll continue to make updates. There’s always room for improvement and we’ll be looking to you for ideas."The announcement also comes packed with an FAQ:
Is this replacing today's Summoner's Rift?
Yes. We’re still ironing out the full launch, but this update will eventually roll out to every queue that loads up Summoner’s Rift. More details to come.
How much is gameplay changing?
We’ve made a number of quality-of-life changes around readability, but you won’t be fail-flashing because of the new map. Flashable walls, turret ranges, lane sizes, brush interaction and ward placements are all exactly as they are on the current map. Dragon and Baron feature reworked design and art, driving them toward feeling more intimidating and powerful. From a purely gameplay perspective, we focused on clarity, eliminating randomness in their attack patterns so skilled players can predict and avoid the monsters’ attacks.
When's it hitting live?
We don’t have an exact date right now. We’ll be squashing bugs, ensuring great performance and listening for player’s feedback throughout the update’s stay on the PBE. All the work ahead makes a firm date tough to pin down.
How do I play the update?
The update will soon patch out to our PBE environments and that’ll be the only place to play until it goes live. We’re working to get the map ship-shape and will keep you posted as launch plans take shape.
Will you do a Team Builder-style beta on Live?
We’d love to open up such a great avenue for feedback and we’re exploring the possibility, but technical hurdles like patch sizes and performance concerns make a live beta a tricky proposition for this update. We’ll keep you posted.
Will I need to upgrade my PC or Mac to play?
At this very moment, the new map is more memory (RAM) intensive than the current map, however we’re optimizing like crazy and we’re committed to performance parity with the current Summoner’s Rift. You will not need to upgrade your PC or Mac.
What's this mean for other maps?
We’re not quite sure yet. We’re laser-focused on getting this update to players globally.
Dev Blog: Updating Summoner's Rift
Following that announcement, Riot Aeon posted up a developer's blog regarding the Summoner's Rift update and what the team focused their efforts on:"Welcome to the first dev blog for our update to Summoner’s Rift! We’ll be doing dev blogs until this update goes live in order to give you guys insight into what we changed and why we changed it.
In general, with the update, we focused our efforts on five main points.
- Clarity and Readability
- Visual Fidelity
- Gameplay
- Thematic Cohesion
- Performance
I’ll try and provide a broad overview of these concepts and let future dev blogs tackle more focused topics. So let’s get into it!
Andrew "Riot Aeon" BrownellClarity and Readability
A lot can happen in a game of LoL. A huge amount of visual and gameplay-related information is communicated all at once across the game UI, units and champions and, of course, the environment. We’ve all been in massive team fights where - after a few seconds - you find yourself staring at a gray screen, not entirely sure what just happened.
When a fraction of a second can mean the difference between life and death, it’s critical the game delivers the most important information at any given moment, in ways that are as clear and easy to understand as possible.
One way to think about this information is in a “visual hierarchy”. There are several different layers that constitute League of Legends’ visual hierarchy:
In Summoner’s Rift today, the environment can compete visually with other game elements. In the middle of a fight, you want to be laser-focused on where Jinx is and whether or not Amumu landed his bandage toss. The environment should make that information easier for you to parse at a glance.
- In-game UI
- Champion and unit abilities and attacks
- Champions and units
- Environment
So with this update to Summoner’s Rift, we’re controlling color and level of detail, clamping value ranges and reducing character occlusion (so there are less cases where you cannot see your character) --- all of which makes for a cleaner gameplay space where critical information pops off the screen.
Additionally, there are some cases where creatures don’t clearly communicate their gameplay and relative threat. For example, Lizard Elder, one of our strongest creatures, looks about as challenging as wolves, one of the weakest camps. Wraiths (which look visually identical, other than size and color) have different types of attacks (the large wraith is ranged, and the small wraiths are melee), but you’d really never know by looking at them.
We‘ve made every effort to ensure each creature represents their gameplay and relative power-level clearly, while also preserving the core gameplay experience.
Gromp, for example, is a tough creature with a fairly powerful ranged attack. When compared to the weaker SR creatures, we want Gromp to look tougher and more dangerous. This is especially important for players new to jungling or LoL in general. We want players to know what they are getting into when they attack Gromp, or any creature. It’s pretty frustrating to attack what you think is a weak, melee creature only to be killed by what is actually be a beefy, ranged monster.
Visual Fidelity
The team working on Summoner’s Rift is filled with many talented artists, and I am not one of them, so one of our art experts will dive deeper into visual fidelity in a later dev blog. But I will say the overall approach we used to develop Summoner’s Rift focused on four major concepts:
- Any artwork we create, first and foremost, should enhance gameplay, clarity, and readability.
- We want to use a stylized approach that will lead to visually stunning environments, minions, and creatures for many years to come.
- Summoner’s Rift is a special place. In our work on the map, we’ve taken to describing Summoner’s Rift as a magic-infused, untamed, mountain top, fantasy forest; a place where we want to spend thousands of hours. While we are making major changes to the environment artwork, we strive to retain the similar mood, tone, and overall feel of the original.
- Our UI, environments, as well as the champions, minions and creatures that inhabit them, should share a consistent quality bar that makes them feel cohesive to one another and toLeague of Legends as a whole.
Gameplay
For this update we focused on keeping gameplay intact as much as possible. We put a ton of effort into ensuring that even though the entire map looks quite different, the layout is nearly identical. Similarly, though many of the creatures look different (or are replaced by completely different creatures), we tried to keep every jungle camp’s gameplay as close to the original one’s as possible. You might notice a few minor differences initially but, in our playtests, players got used to the new camps very quickly.
However, we are making a few intentional changes aimed at making the overall experience better.
First, we added additional gameplay mechanics to Dragon and Baron Nashor to make fighting these monsters feel truly epic, while providing additional opportunities for predictability, optimization and emergent gameplay. The new version of Dragon has two unique area of effect attacks (a line attack much like Viktor’s E and a larger AOE explosion), and Baron has a host of abilities that aim to deliver much more of a boss-battle experience.
Second, we are fixing a ton of navigation bugs and inconsistencies between sides. For example, the south and north bases, which do not have closely-mirrored gameplay spaces on current Summoner’s Rift, are now almost completely mirrored so that the play space between sides matches much more closely.
We are also making a slight change to the game camera angle. This change is aimed at making skill-shots more accurate as they approach the edges of the screen as well as slightly increasing the amount of camera space at the bottom of the screen. We’ll go into more detail about this in our next dev blog that focuses on gameplay.
Thematic Cohesion
While there are plenty of thematic elements that are working on Summoner’s Rift, we thought we could do a better job of making the creatures and environment feel like they are anchored in the world of Runeterra. The south wolf camp is a good example. Wolves now live outside a bone-strewn cave from which magic is seeping out - affecting the wolves themselves as well as the nearby plants.
Performance
It doesn’t matter how great Summoner’s Rift looks if you can’t play it though.
Throughout our development, our goal has been to make this map perform at least as well as current SR and preferably even better. We haven’t hit our target performance yet but we are committed to getting performance as good as current SR by the time we release it.
We still have a ton of improvements to make on the tech side to optimize the experience, especially for lower end machines, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on this from now until the map goes live to everyone.
We'll have more information coming so check back and let us know if you have any questions!
AND MORE!
If all that wasn't enough, here's a series of screen grabs from the WORK IN PROGRESS video from above.
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