Riot Games now has a dedicated League lore team

In a new post on Nexus, Rioters Ariel “Thermal Kitten” Lawrence and Laurie “Scathelock” Goulding clarified some details on how the League of Legends lore team has been operating over the past few years. Most notably, they talked about how there hasn’t actually been a lore team. Instead, the stories and bios were written by all kinds of Rioters all over the place. This resulted in a less than clear narrative structure for the game.

Since the end of 2017, Lawrence and Goulding have been trying to rectify the strangeness present in the League lore. Now, all pieces go through them, to make sure that the team can build out a thoughtful and coherent world. They two of them also have quite a few plans for this upcoming year.

The first mission is for lore to hit most frequently. They authors point to the recent re-release of Swain and the Noxus lore update that came with it.

Second, the team wants to be more upfront with players. When big lore decisions are happening, we’ll be able to see and hear about it more frequently.

Finally, the team wants to answer some questions that players have had for years. The League world, however garbled, is full of untold mysteries. What are the Watchers? What is the Void, really? Who the hell knows, but it seems like we may find out sooner rather than later now.

Riot Games

Lawrence and Goulding then tackled a big question players seem to ask: “Why do you update the lore?” The answer they give is relatively simple. Some characters have poor or boring stories and they deserve better. They compare patching the lore to patching League itself. Sometimes, thing just need to be fixed up.

Similarly, the team doesn’t necessarily believe that rebooting the lore is the only way to fix some of these problems. Instead, they use the newest Annie cinematic and the Miss Fortune comic as examples of progressive storytelling. Rather than fix their lore, we simply learn more about them as characters.

For the rest of the year, we have a lot to look forward to. Lawrence and Goulding mention a few new areas we may learn more about. Specifically, The Void, Ionia, Bilgewater, and even the Darkin.

What could all of this mean? It sounds like we might finally find out in 2018.