Every Tuesday I like to take some time to focus on the hardworking and dedicated “YouTubers” within the gaming community. This week features a clip from Riot Game’s YouTube page outlining the extensive changes to the League of Legends stealth system. This has been something the game has needed for a long time as the existing stealth system is responsible for creating stealth based characters that are either wildly overpowered win machines or easy to blame scapegoats, not something you’re looking for in a tenuously balance MOBA. In fact this is a common problem for MOBAs in general, but perhaps Riot has found a place for the mechanic to function properly within their gameplay.
Mid July Update
Evelyn, The Widowmaker Update
In the two updates posted above Phreak describes Riot’s overall approach to renovating the stealth system as well as the specific changes made to Evelyn. This was something that fans of the game, myself included, have been eagerly anticipating for a long time. While Riot has hinted in the past that work was being done on LoL’s stealth system these two videos represent the first official word of the finished product. I’ll refrain from giving my opinion until I’ve played it, but it looks like they’ve managed to address some of the major balance issues.
MOBAs and most games in general have struggled with balancing stealth in gameplay for a long time. I find that I’m either underpowered or ludicrously overpowered, neither of which are fun for very long. Stealth characters are often pigeonholed into assassin-like gameplay with little to no options for any other sort of gameplay. So while these changes may not balance every single issue, it’s nice to progress made in one of gaming’s notoriously unbalanced skill sets.
There’s also something to be said about how modular their system is as well, most game’s couldn’t make sweeping changes to an in-game system like this without a very large patch, but here Riot simply changes a few heroes and the whole game feels a bit different. It wasn’t always like this, but for at least the past year Riot’s patching system has been pretty flawless, allowing them to make large changes to their game without breaking it.
I’m looking forward to playing the patch once it’s released as it looks like it will have a large impact on the game. Perhaps a patch review is in my future.
