Visual and sound effects updates coming for Mundo, Teemo, Anivia, Renekton, and Gragas

If you’re one of the many players who have used Veigar’s ultimate lately and thought to yourself, “Wait, has it always looked like that?” We’re here to put your pretty little mind at ease. No, it hasn’t always looked like that. Actually, it’s been about two months since it was changed, alongside abilities for Jarvan, Lee Sin, and Vi.

Riot is in the middle of a project to run through clumps of old champions to update their visual and audio effects. It isn’t as big of a deal as the Ezreal update, per se, and therefore didn’t receive any marketing or formal announcement from Riot. But it’s still a much-needed project, and five more champions are about to receive updates of their own, according to Riot’s announcement on the League of Legends forums yesterday.

The champions being targeted by this beauty treatment are Dr. Mundo, Anivia, Teemo, Gragas, and Renekton. Riot even released a short video highlighting Mundo’s new visuals, although nothing similar has been done to show off the other champions just yet.

As you can see, these are far from total visual redesigns. They aren’t on par with Ezreal or Akali’s updates, and they don’t entail any sort of complete rebuild of lore and gameplay mechanics. These updates are just meant to make abilities look and sound prettier, and that goal seems to have been accomplished at least for Mundo.

For the most part, these visual updates only seem to include base skins, with some exceptions made for older skins. Don’t expect newer skins, like El Macho Mundo, to receive much in the way of visuals. It’s possible that the skin’s audio will be cleaned up a bit, though.

With Mundo, Riot wanted to make him feel more Zaunian, which is the region he’s from in the game’s lore universe, and that’s reflected in many of his new audio effects and the bright greens in his new visuals.

These updates weren’t given an official launch date, but we suspect they’ll be out within the next couple of months once they hit the PBE. That’s typically the longest anything lasts on the PBE before getting pushed live.