League of Legends designer shares game design field manual(areadenial.games) |
League of Legends designer shares game design field manual(areadenial.games) |
But since we're on the topic: Riot has a lot of incredibly knowledgeable game designers who have spent years sharing much of the reasoning behind various design decisions. The two main ones that stand out to me are Riot August (creator of Jinx and Jhin) and Riot Phreak (previous head of the balance team).
Phreak in particular has been publishing videos on YouTube for years explaining their reasoning for the balance changes in each new patch. I don't even play and I still check out the videos sometimes.
The other one is Riot August. I've occasionally opened up his livestreams where he's answering questions and yapping, but the highlights are usually posted on social media platforms as clips.
There's a lot for which you can criticize Riot, but they're actually pretty transparent about communicating the decision making behind balance changes and listening to the community. Most games updates come in the form of receiving a set of patch notes, where if you're really lucky they might include some explanations for why those changes were made. Don't take community communication for granted.
As for balance, I think they've actually done a pretty great job. League of Legends has 171 champions and in MSI 2026, their latest international esports event, 104 were played. For comparison, DotA2 has 126 heroes and in The International 2025, 107 heroes were played.
There's a lot of weird code and technical debt in the game client. For example, a map-wide filter (Nocturne's ult) is actually a giant minion covering the whole map.
If it works it works. The code isn’t the product.
I fixed the title for you.
But, somewhat ironically, LLMs are unbelievably bad at writing.
I can read thousands of words from my favorite authors without getting annoyed by their tics and their grammar. People like Nikhil Suresh literally make me laugh out loud when I read their writing. But something about AI-slop-prose is just obvious and gross and annoying to read.
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Riot is the Monsanto of game developers - because EA/Activision/Blizzard/Epic all contend for that spot too.
Examples range from the quality of their patch notes, dev articles and videos, to their constant presence on reddit, and willingness to walk back decisions based on public outcry (Hextech Chests, League Classic monetization, etc).
Heck, after Riot gave up on Hytale, they were willing to sell the IP and assets back to the original creator while providing extremely generous severance packages for the entire team. I genuinely don't think any of the other companies you listed would have done the same.
Like if I wanted this information I could just prompt it myself. But if a human wrote it it would somehow feel worthwhile to read.
The information is hard to read because I had to run an https://tropes.fyi/ filter over the essay to make it readable.
> The screen we shipped in January 2016 made two statements at once: pick intent said your plan matters, while the queue attached to it said what a ladder measures is negotiable. Players parsed the two separately, with total precision. They kept the first and burned the second down.
This is a classic AI construction to me that reeks of Markov chain thinking. The first half is probably the prompt to some extent. The second half ... doesn't actually say anything if you read it closely. Humans can write this sort of content-free fluff but usually they do it for a strategic reasons and not when they're trying to explain something. "Players parsed the two separately, with total precision" resolves a question of clarity that was never raised and for which there is no evidence of problem or solution (it is probably trying to say they understood and disregarded ... something that was basically elided). Then we have a tortured metaphor that doesn't tell us anything about what the players did.
It is quite tiring to read because you have to re-read things a few times to confirm that it didn't say anything and it isn't pretty wordwork worth reading on its own. Reading this is an exercise in trying to reverse-engineer the prompt.
This lingo infuriates me
Dota itself wasn't even original, it was based on a StarCraft 1 custom map.
There's nothing of significance in LoL vs the original DotA.
Same applies to DotA 2 btw. Valve is making changes for the sake of changes. Now every hero has a talent tree for example. Has the game become better because of that? I don't think so.
I bet if they did A/B when they rolled that update out, not a lot of people would have stayed on the new version.
Who should pay who do you think in this?
Would love to hear.
Or is this the same as "reparations"? Poeple just dont want others to succeed.
A good writer says what needs to be said and no more, AI is on the other side of the spectrum, it just needs to say things just to say things
That's what I find so frustrating about games these days. The most effective business models (by a long way) are the ones that lean into all of the dark patterns.
They can attract great talent to work on them, and afford the time to build them well, because there's so much money sloshing around.
But that's beside the point. I don't think League of Legends is especially predatory, I just think it's a mediocre game that was well marketed at the right time to go "viral".
Totally agree on the dark patterns though.
Out of interest what is a game you consider excellent that maybe wasn’t marketed as well?
Personally I really like dungeon keeper 1 (& 2 as well somewhat) - but Bullfrog was very unsuccessful as a company and went under. I don’t know exactly why, should look into that history