Riot Games likes to try out all sorts of absurd ideas in their development of new champions for League of Legends. This aims to provide the company with maximum creative freedom to design interesting champions. One idea for the champion Aphelios was that it should interact with the real world.
How does champion design work? It takes months for a new champion to be designed and ultimately released. On average, about 1 year. The designers plan not only the abilities and the design but also the associated story within the LoL world.
During development, however, there is a lot of experimentation between design and abilities. Riot’s philosophy encourages trying out all possible ideas in the development of new champions, leading to crazy ideas that often do not make it into the actual game.
Even one of the most important LoL champions went through several design ideas: LoL: A unique relationship created one of the most important champions.
Advantages were planned when you go outside
What were possible ideas? In a Twitch stream, Lead Champion Designer August Browning discussed general design philosophies as well as planned ideas from Senior Game Design Manager Bradford “CertainlyT” Wenban that never made it to the live servers.
CertainlyT was involved with the champions Darius, Zyra, Thresh, Yasuo, Kalista, Zoe, and Aphelios and also worked on the reworks of Mordekaiser, Graves, Caitlyn, Warwick, and Akali. Therefore, he has been part of some of the most creative champions in the game.
For Zoe’s ultimate, for example, a second application was planned. A kind of panic button that gave Zoe the ability to teleport to a random location on the map instead of teleporting back and forth.
The rework of Akali originally had the idea that she could latch onto projectiles from team members. However, the most interesting idea came from the ADC Aphelios. Since he is closely tied to the moon in the game’s lore, real moon phases were also supposed to influence the champion.
How was Aphelios supposed to work? It was planned that Aphelios would gain strength depending on the moon phase. On full moon, it would be the perfect time to pick Aphelios. August Browning describes the basic idea as follows:
The idea would be that if you go outside at night and see a full moon, you think, I should play League of Legends now, Aphelios is strong at the moment. I think that’s a really creative way to engage players with the game.
However, the idea did not make it into the actual game. One must not forget that League of Legends is essentially a competitive game, and such mechanics can also diminish the usefulness of a champion.
Nevertheless, Aphelios has become a controversial champion, which recently caused a stir at the MSI:
LoL: 2 champs spoiled the fun for fans at the big tournament – one is a Netflix star
