Many League of Legends fans were saddened to hear that Riot Games won’t be implementing Xayah and Rakan’s joint recall ability into future skins. But according to the game’s executive producer, there is a very good reason why Riot Games has discontinued this feature from the champions.
Jeremy “Brightmoon” Lee reached out to Xayah and Rakan players today after a good amount of backlash popped up following the news. He maintained full transparency while still defending the skins teams after multiple people began calling the developers lazy and uncaring of the player base.
Related: Riot set to abandon unique Xayah and Rakan feature in new updates, leaving players devastated
“When we created Xayah and Rakan, we wanted to try a lot of new things—a shared recall animation being one of them,” Brightmoon said on the League subreddit. “It took a lot of work, blending animations from two champs that could come together at any point during either recall. We also didn’t really know if players would care or use it that much, but because of their theme it was worth it to try something new.”
Six years later, Riot has discovered that the pick rate for Xayah and Rakan as a duo is relatively low, and an even smaller portion of players use the same skin line when playing both champions on the same team. As a result, the devs opted to apply the same base joint recall animation to every skin, instead of creating new ones for every joint skin that Xayah and Rakan shared.
These animations take some time to add to the game and aren’t even used a whole lot by the players in the first place. Because of this, Riot had to make the tough decision to scrap the animation for any other skins moving forward.
“When we look at how long it takes to add this special animation for how little use it gets, we are forced with a hard trade off,” Brightmoon said. “Continue doing it, or put the effort into something that will be more meaningful for more players? We try not to make those trade-offs because it always sucks for some group of players, but we do have to make them sometimes because we have limited time and resources to do everything.”
