Riot has announced that a REPLAY system will be launching for the LCU this pre-season!

Table of Contents

Announcement

"That time we said we weren’t doing Replays…



The last time we talked about Replays was about a year ago in our first Riot Pls. At that time, a number of factors led us to deprioritize Replays. Since then, we’ve put a ton of love into League’s global infrastructure (for example creating Riot Direct), prompting us to revisit the conversation. At that point, we realized it was finally the right time for us to explore the feature.

We had everything we needed to build Replays except support for backpatching—which lets you watch replays from previous patches. So we asked ourselves: is backpatching so important we can’t ship Replays without it? We knew players wanted to relive specific moments from a match, no matter how much time had passed, and realized we could reach other solutions to that problem than backpatching.

That brings us to where we are today. We are ready to announce that Replays are coming to the League client update this pre-season.

Here’s how it works:

Download your replay from the End of Game Screen or Match History.

Watch Replays from the current patch using our new Replay Mode, with the functionality you’re used to from Spectator Mode.

Find cool moments using the new Annotated Timeline, which marks major events like kills, takedowns of towers and inhibitors, and dragon/baron kills.

Capture video clips of your in-game moments (“Highlights”) using built-in recording functionality.

These Highlights will be stored on your hard drive (C:\MyDocuments\LeagueofLegends\Highlights) as a .webm video file. These files can be viewed by opening them in any browser that supports HTML5, and shared to social media alongside your cat gifs.

With all of those pieces put together, you’ll be able to quickly capture, save, and share your favorite moments on video to share whenever you want.

This is our first iteration and we’re excited to keep working on the feature. Stay tuned in the coming months for more details!"

Additional Discussion

Cactopus

"Basically, we decided to launch it without support for watching replays for older patches. We could have held it off while coming up with a solution, but instead we decided to give you guys a version 1.00 that gets the job done. We'll keep working on it!"

"We're pretty straight up about this. We're not trying to create the ultimate game archival system. We just want players to have working replays right now. And we'll keep working on it going forward."

"Watch replays during the current patch. Save them as recordings if you want to keep them past the current patch."

Gentleman-Gustaf

"Quote:

The way I understood it, we can still watch replays from older patches because the videos are saved on our hard drives in .webm format, meaning we can upload them somewhere and watch them that way, even if they are not on the current patch. Am I misunderstanding? sort of. The Replays themselves are a lot like spectator mode. You can hop into the actual game, change where the camera is, and so on. You can then also record parts of the game (or the whole game) from a fixed viewpoint, like a regular video. Once the patch ends, you can no longer do the first part, but you can do the second part." RiotMrBBunaby added:

""Replay" = the ability to toggle fog of war, move the camera, center on different champions, etc. (basically anything that the Spectator controls allow you to do). Highlights = video clip that you've created, never expire, and can be shared anywhere videos exist."

In the boards thread for the announcement, Cactopus he'd be sticking around to answer questions on the League Client Update Beta:

"Yo, hit me with any questions y'all have about the client update! Open beta is coming soon—we hope to announce a specific date closer to preseason." When asked about the estimated time for the LCU beta to hit live servers, Cactopus noted:

"Official date coming soon. Aiming this year, but things can always change with game development." As for when the LCU will replace the current legacy client, Cactopus commented:

"after open beta ends. probably early 2017? we gotta see how open beta goes down tho"

When asked how big each replay file is, Cactopus noted:

"roughly 10mb apiece" He

"yep, they're .rofl files"

BACK TO TOP] In the boards thread for the announcement, added he'd be sticking around to answer questions on the League Client Update Beta:When asked about the estimated time for the LCU beta to hit live servers,As for when the LCU will replace the current legacy client,When asked how big each replay file is,noted:He continued

Continue reading for more information!From the official announcement - " Road to Pre-Season: Replays on the Horizon ":When asked about the lack of back patch support with the launch,He added He added When asked how the replays work with current patches,