League Of Legends - "Summoners Rift" Gets An Impressive Visual Overhaul

What do you do to maintain your spot as the top dog of all MOBA's in an increasingly crowded space? You get to work on making a great game even better. The process of overhauling League Of Legends, which started off as an eye searingly saturated game with a hyper stylized look to it (I still remember how insanely bright the game was during the beta) has been an ongoing process as more and more talent has joined the studio with Riot's meteoric growth.

Night and day much?

And you know what, I absolutely love this new direction they're going in. It's not a small step towards turning their game to the next level..We're talking leaps and bounds here compared to what they currently have going on in the Summoners Rift. The new look is a painterly approach that brings to mind the environment paintings of Disney movies, with an overall feel that resembles a halfway point between World Of Warcraft and Diablo 3.

If you're interested in learning about what goes into executing successful art re-direction, there's a ton of great information here regarding the usage of saturation control and visual language differentiation to control gameplay and guide the players eye. Following the roll out of this update though, I'm sure players will start asking for the obvious next step: An extensive overhaul of the champions to reflect the changes to the environment. Very curious to see how other MOBA's in the market, including Dota 2 will respond to this update.