Resistance Illaoi’s development has wrapped up, and the skin is ready to be loaded onto the PBE for the last stage of bug-fixing, according to the design team’s announcement today.
The final steps of the skin’s design boiled down to tweaking animations for colorblind players, fixing bugs, and one final pass at her Q, Tentacle Smash, to make the ability just a bit more Battlecast-esque.
Riot has been sharing updates on the development of Resistance Illaoi since its design began. These updates were promised after Riot hosted a community vote to decide which skin she’d receive. The original idea was Battlecast Illaoi, but after Riot decided it wasn’t technically a Battlecast skin (I.E. completely made of metal and steam) it would fit elsewhere into the Battlecast universe better. Thus, Resistance Illaoi was born.
After most of the designing was finished, Riot determined that her Q simply wasn’t Battlecast enough. It needed more Michael Bay. That is, it either needed more explosions, cheesy red holograms, or just plain old fire. Eventually, the design team landed on explosions, ushering in the final draft of her Q before hitting the public testing server.
Whenever Riot designs a skin, it always works in colorblind compatibility so all of League’s players can interact in a healthy way. This time around, Illaoi’s tentacles were particularly hard to see on the backdrop of the grass of Summoner’s Rift, so something needed to change.
By adding more of a glowing effect to the base of the tentacles, Riot was able to help them stand out.
The final stage for Resistance Illaoi’s development will be PBE testing, and then onto the live server in the very next patch, as per usual with brand new skins. Riot didn’t give a timeline in this update, but it did say the skin would be “coming soon™ to a PBE near you.”
If it hits the PBE within the next day or so, we could even see if go live as soon as Patch 8.5, which is only two weeks away.
