14 DAY TRIAL // League of Legends developer Riot Games has just confirmed that it's going to be overhauling the core Summoner's Rift map for the popular multiplayer online battle arena, in order to make it more clear and less visually cluttered and confusing.
League of Legends is one of the most popular MOBA titles out there and developer Riot Games has made sure not to introduce too many new things in order to retain the balance that's so precious to its millions of players around the world.
However, this doesn't mean that Riot is afraid of tampering with core elements, as it's just confirmed that the basic Summoner's Rift map will get a big overhaul in the future to make the map clearer and less confusing in terms of visuals.
Riot's Andrew Brownell has explained in a comprehensive blog post about the upcoming improved version of the map that the studio doesn't want to fix what isn't broken and that it has a lot of ideas for small but significant problems.
"A lot can happen in a game of LoL. A huge amount of visual and gameplay-related information is communicated all at once across the game UI, units and champions and, of course, the environment. We’ve all been in massive team fights where – after a few seconds – you find yourself staring at a gray screen, not entirely sure what just happened."
Because knowing what's happening on the screen is so important in League of Legends, Riot established a hierarchy of visual elements, ranging from the in-game user interface to the champion abilities and attacks, to the actual characters, and then the environment.
"In Summoner’s Rift today, the environment can compete visually with other game elements. In the middle of a fight, you want to be laser-focused on where Jinx is and whether or not Amumu landed his bandage toss. The environment should make that information easier for you to parse at a glance."
"So with this update to Summoner’s Rift, we’re controlling color and level of detail, clamping value ranges and reducing character occlusion (so there are less cases where you cannot see your character) --- all of which makes for a cleaner gameplay space where critical information pops off the screen."
In order to show off some of the actual improvements, Riot has posted a video revealing a work in progress version of the new Summoner's Rift. As you can see, while the environment is less colorful and it's much easier to notice a lot of different elements, chief among which being neutral NPCs.
The map is still being worked on but it will debut soon enough on the Public Beta Environment so that users can try it out and give feedback to Riot.
