Revealed on Friday, June 6, Riot Games will be significantly updating League of Legends’ Summoner’s Rift map to an aesthetic aimed at being more thematically cohesive to the League of Legends universe, as well as updating its visual fidelity and gameplay among others.
In the first of possibly many dev blogs Riot Games’ update to Summoner’s Rift, the studio’s Andrew “Riot Aeon” Brownell outlined five different main points that’d be changed with the update: Clarity and Readability, Visual Fidelity, Gameplay, Thematic Cohesion and Performance.
With the update, Riot hopes to make the game’s visual information a lot easier to comprehend and understand. Terming this information as a “visual hierarchy”, the update to Summoner’s Rift will touch on in-game UI, the abilities and attacks of champions and units, the champions and the units themselves, and the environment.
“ In Summoner’s Rift today, the environment can compete visually with other game elements, ” Aeon said. “ 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, ” Aeon added, “ 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. ”
Aeon continued on to outline that there will also be changes to the creeps that lurk in the jungle of Summoner’s Rift, with an effort to “ ensure each creature represents their gameplay and relative power-level clearly, while also preserving the core gameplay experience. “
Aeon also stated that, with the visual update, the studio will endeavor to ensure that Summoner’s Rift will perform just as well or better than the current iteration of the map does.
“ We still have a ton of improvements to make on the tech side to optimize the experience, especially for lower end machines, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on this from now until the map goes live to everyone, ” Aeon noted.
You can view Riot Game’s full rundown of the update via the source link below. In the meantime, take a full glimpse of what’s to come via the video embedded below.