The publisher’s of the biggest esport on the planet are giving it a facelift.
The Summoner’s Rift, the name for League of Legends’ battleground, is getting a complete visual update, Riot Games’ development blog revealed today.
The changes aren’t just an increase in eye candy, though the new map looks much nicer than the current cartoonish incarnation. The colors are a bit more muted, and that’s part of company’s goal to increase visual fidelity, to make the most important things in a game of League—the player characters, spell effects, and mobs and minions—more visible.
The game’s minions and jungle monsters have all received new looks. For example, the newest jungle monster, the Wight, added in November of last year, was simply a larger scaled re-skin of the wraith camp. It now has a new look and new name, the frog-like Gromp, a dangerous looking rock beast in a mushroom covered lair.
The two major map objectives in League are Baron Nashor and the Dragon, and they’ve both received new models and gameplay mechanics to “make fighting these monsters feel truly epic.”
The team’s goal was to maintain gameplay “as much as possible.” Despite the changes, the map geometry should play much the same. The layout has only received small changes, fixing discrepancies between the two opposing sides of the map.
Overall, it looks like a solid improvement to League, and should make playing the game—and watching esports matches—a much better experience.
