LoL – Visual Updates and the Udyr VGU: September’s Champion Roadmap Recapped

For those who are unfamiliar with the topic, the League of Legends team at Riot Games reveals their intentions for the future in a summary called a Champion Roadmap.

Their main goal with this is to reveal their plans to the community, so they can assess the feedback and act accordingly. 

It mostly focuses on the design of new champions and their release schedule, as well as visual and gameplay updates to already existing champions and skins. In the latest edition that was released a few days ago on the League of Legends website, they reveal more detail about the upcoming champions and the Udyr rework.

Release schedule moving forward

In a Champion Roadmaps from last year, they shared that they intend to release one champion per role each year. The only exception to this is the mid-lane, where they want to release two champions per year. One for assassin and skirmish players and another for mage players. So that means six new champion releases apart from the VGUs. So far this year we’ve gotten Viego, Gwen, Akshan, and Vex.

Both of the champions, planned to release by the end of the year, were planned to be a part of an event. But throughout the development, their team realized that they didn’t fit the thematic of the event. Because they liked how the champions were designed, they didn’t want to change them to fit the event. So likely we will be receiving these champions early next year.

The two new champions

These two champions are supposedly a new bot lane ADC and new support.

The new ADC will be based around the theme of lightning and focuses on constant movement as a part of his kit to fulfill his goal. A champion that plays the game at a fast pace and brings the feeling of a shooter game in League. It will also feature a unique basic attack concept similar to the altered autos of Jhin, Graves, and Xayah. Nothing more has been so far announced, but this hints at an ADC that unlocks spells by auto-attacking, similar to Samira Ultimate or Ashe Q.

As for the new support, it will be based on gold and other forms of resources. They mention that it will be able to control or purchase in-game features, so maybe we’ll see something similar to Sylas, Viego, or terrain manipulation. There is an end goal to this as well, with them hinting at something that should happen to prevent or stop this. This should be welcomed and considered as a form of counterplay, as opposed to Sylas taking Kennen Ultimate and making a game-winning play or Viego possessing your most fed teammate.

Bringing back pure visual updates

An exciting topic they mention is pure visual updates. The first one of these should happen by the end of the year, and it will be the first one since 2015 when they updated Alistar. The League team that is responsible for skin development, events, and other cosmetics will do these updates called Art and Sustainability updates or ASU. Their main goal is to update League’s older champions to bring them up to par with the current quality standards, fix technical issues and make it easier to develop skins for those champions in the future. These ASU are supposed to be a visual refreshment and that’s why they won’t affect the champions lore or gameplay, which is normally the case for a VGU. It will mostly focus on outdated animations, improvements in gameplay clarity, outdated outfits, and so on. To accomplish this, the base champion character and the oldest skin for that champion will receive the most changes. 

Latest on the Udyr VGU

After announcing the Udyr rework three months ago, a lot of progress has been made. Some of the aspects that the community had input on were his antlers. The development team decided that they were necessary to differentiate him by his silhouette and distinguish him from Olaf. Option B from the picture seems like the most likely choice, a fine balance between aesthetics and an aggressive approach.

To celebrate the relationship Udyr and Lee Sin developed in Ionia, there is a possibility they will also add a headwrap to Udyr as well. After a lot of positive feedback, they decided to make his stances a lot more distinguishable in the form of a Frejlord demigod.

This also opens up a lot of opportunities to integrate Udyr into Runeterra in a stronger way, which should get fans excited. The next edition of the Champion Roadmap is expected at the start of next year, and it will reveal more about the new support, the next VGU after Udyr, and a new Void Champion that will likely be a jungler.

 

(Header image via League of Legends)