Lore in League of Legends seems to be less and less important. Riot even revealed how they are changing up lore, but is that truly a good thing?
League of Legends is not just a battle arena. It's much more than that, with an extensive universe featuring characters players truly care about. With the addition of the card game Legends of Runeterra, the world of League has managed to grow.
One thing that has become evident though is that Riot is also shifting their capacities to make as much profit as possible, with small details, like lore, getting left behind. The newest champion releases, Briar and Naafiri, show this once more.
LoL: Briar Release Confirms Growing Lack Of Lore
Similar to Naafiri, Briar will not be getting a color story.
by u/mystireon in leagueoflegends
While Riot have done a lot of great things in 2023, with the Soul Fighter event being one of the best and most engaging in a long time, the community is still pretty upset over some other decisions that have been made by the game developers.
One of the things the community has asked about for a long time is what happened to lore, especially on the League of Legends universe page which seems to have been completely neglected.
Over the last few months, more and more people from the narrative team also either left Riot Games, or were let go completely. This doesn't bode well for the future of lore.
Naafiri was also released without a color story and it was confirmed by Riot Lexical, that Briar also won't be getting one with her release either.
We decided this year to channel lots of that narrative energy into finding alternative methods for exposé of a champion. Not that it means there won't be more color stories, just that most of those don't really have readership as wide as we would like compared to postcards, cinematic trailer etc etc.
It seems that a champion's lore will be expanded through different means in the future. We've seen a lot of lore exploration being done through games like Riot Forge's The Mageseeker, but that has another paywall which players first have to get over before they can find out more about the story – and let's be real not everyone has the cash to purchase every Riot Forge game just for some lore expansion, right?
Players have also realized that it seems like Riot won't be doing much of anything that has a 'small player base' when it doesn't turn a profit.
Riot be like:
— Bess (@BessWisty) August 31, 2023
We won't do PvE modes because is just a small playerbase that plays
We won't do short stories because is just a small playerbase that reads
We will do Jhin's Gacha because a small playerbase asked for that pic.twitter.com/qFVTYpaqlG
Just recently they revealed their plans for the $200 Dark Cosmic Erasure Jhin skin, which is for a small player base that wants exclusive content, but they won't be adding color stories or PvE game modes because the target audience is too small.
Understandably, the skin is a lot less effort with a lot more money to be made, but it's sad to see that lore seems to be less and less important, especially after the success of Arcane which got players and fans hyped for the stories of the characters in the game.