Riot is nearly finished designing Battlecast Illaoi

Battlecast Illaoi, the tentacle queen’s first skin since Void Bringer, is officially in development, according to Riot’s announcement yesterday. The skin is currently in the “concepting” stage of production, which is when the design team comes up with the perfect combination of looks and lore to go along with it.

There are three key problems that need to be solved during this phase. Firstly, the story behind the skin needs to make sense and fit into the Battlecast multiverse, in which Viktor began his glorious revolution and mechanized some of the game’s most fearsome champions. Illaoi will be his first project gone wrong. She broke free and began a resistance before he could complete her transformation to machine.

The next problem is the skull. That’s a very large, flaming, mechanical skull, and it needs to both fit with the rest of the kit without drawing too much attention away from Illaoi and it needs to make sense with the skin’s story.

As it stands now, the skull will be from one of the mechanized guards from the compound Illaoi escaped from, and now she wields it with her mechanical arm—the one part of her body that Viktor managed to weaponize.

The third and final piece of the puzzle is her tentacles. Her passive ability’s tentacles are the staple of Illaoi’s kit, and Riot really needs to nail them to sell the skin. So far, the possibilities are floating towards fire and lava that is controlled by some sort of machine, much like the other Battlecast skins.

For a while, the design team was tooling around with the idea of a giant lava hand, but ultimately they decided that a hand on the end of a tentacle would require too much reanimation.

According to the announcement, the team is about 90 percent finished with concepting, and then it’s onto building her in the client, and that’s when Riot will have a rough estimate for the skin’s release date.