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.

The Art Of Zeronis

(Via)

Zeronis is the community alias for Paul Hyun Woo Kwon, a talented concept artist with an awesome style currently employed at Riot games. Starting off as a freelance artist for the company on League Of Legends back in 2011, he transitioned over to a more full time role in 2012 as a champion designer. Kwon also works as a freelancer for Blizzard on multiple projects to keep him well rounded.

Considering that Riot's in house style drew a lot of inspiration from Blizzard's repertoire of titles, Kwon's dual role makes a lot of sense. With a love of females as his subject matter overall, expect a lot of awesome pieces from titles including Diablo 3, League of Legends and more after the break!

League Of Legends Invites You To Get Jinxed

I stopped playing League of Legends a while ago-like various addictive substances, MOBA's are a dangerous breed to the artist seeking to make a living. Their beckoning call of 'casual' 45 minute matches inevitably lead to hours of trying to recoup lost win-streaks, copious amounts of money 'invested' into skins (Mundo always had the best) and champions and numerous force-uninstalls. It was like a bad habit I couldn't shake for a while, an awfully fun one at that.

Disturbing personal addiction stories aside, Riot's definitely excelled into turning League of Legends into a cultural phenom akin to the early days of World of Warcraft. Their attention to lore, their fans and their top notch promotional materials has allowed them to cement themselves as a powerhouse in the game industry, as well as cornering a good chunk of the MOBA market. Their latest cinematic, simply created to promote an upcoming character called Jinx is just a testament as to how much work they put into every champion and release, using a fun mix of 2D and 3D animation to show off her trigger happy ways.

Fun story: I fondly remember being invited to a small E3 party hosted by the Riot guys in 2009 when they first showed off an early version of League of Legends and allowed us to take it for a spin. After a round of destroying party goers with Singed and marveling at the streamlined, fun gameplay I stood up right then and there, shook Guinsoo's hand (One of the main creators of DOTA All Stars and consequently League of Legends) and told him: This is going to be huge. The rest is history, and I couldn't be happier for their success. In the meanwhile I'm going to go make some more items for Dota 2 to pay for Awesomerobo bills.