Over the years there’s been things we would and wouldn’t do in game modes for League of Legends. In 2017, we’re interested in breaking some of those expectations and seeing how far we can push gameplay while still retaining the fun essence of regular League.

Our most recent game mode Dark Star: Singularity is the furthest departure from standard League gameplay we’ve ever tried. We’re super excited about the space (see what I did there), but being this far from home brings with it some new problems to solve.

We’re going to dive a little deeper into some of the challenges faced by both Design and Art when crafting the latest mode, and why we chose to solve them in the ways we did.

Design – Luke “RabidLlama” Rinard

League of Legends is sort of like a great big toybox. Each character is an awesome action figure, and everybody has their favorites. In previous years, we didn’t want to take away any of those toys. Every mode had to let players play their favorite champion, and we focused on trying to change the play experience while dealing with this constraint. This limited us to only being able to provide certain kinds of experiences: Ones where ranged attackers, support casters, and tanky bruisers all had a place.

This year, we decided to drop that requirement and see where it led us. The first experiment was Hunt of the Blood Moon, where we limited the champion pool to a subset of agile, bursty, “assassin-y” champions, and built a gameplay experience that was really suited to their strengths.

This time, with Dark Star: Singularity, we decided to take one toy out of the toybox and build a playset for him. We ended up picking Thresh, an iconic champion with an iconic kit, as our first subject. Largely, this was because his abilities have a lot of what I’d call kinetic fun – it just feels so good to throw that hook and watch the impact as it lands. The objective was to make a mode that showcased what was most exciting about playing Thresh, and to provide a map and a set of rules well-suited to his abilities.

The objective was to have fast, “arcadey” gameplay, which means getting straight into the action. In this case, we decided to remove gold, levels, and items entirely, and to just focus on Thresh’s three core abilities, which we powered up and tweaked. We kept health, but changed its meaning – instead of dying when your health hits zero, you are instead more vulnerable to being flung into the Dark Star. This meant skillful play could win any encounter, even if you were at 1 HP.

Having removed as much as we could, we started adding things back. We work under a complexity budget for new elements, since our modes are ideally very pick-up-and-play and we don’t want players to feel overwhelmed. To this point, and to make the mode feel as “Thresh-y” as possible, we didn’t change or add any inputs – meaning, your attacks and abilities all do the same things, just moreso. Instead, we added new elements and rules to change the outputs of those abilities.

Ideally, each new element should serve multiple gameplay purposes, to get the biggest return on the added complexity of including something new. Abyss Scuttlers act as dynamic cover, as free points if the enemy is just hiding, and as a catch-up opportunity for a struggling team. Gravity Anchors serve as reliable movement around the map, as “terrain” that blocks hooks, and as a way to rescue yourself from certain death. Health Crystals are something strategic to fight over, provide a new objective for low-health Threshes (Thresh-i?), and open up more teamplay opportunities.

In creating the mode, Design and Art had to work closely together. The core gameplay of the mode emerged from an idea sparked by a visual thematic pitch – one of our team’s artists suggested using Dark Star Thresh, and I immediately had a vision of how awesome it would be to toss an unwilling enemy into a black hole and watch them disintegrate. It wasn’t long before we had a working prototype of the mode, and a hand-drawn skeleton of a map in-game.