Everyone’s favorite hammer girl has been on our scopes for a while, as she’s one of those older champions in need of across-the-board work to bring her up to current standards. To be clear, we LOVE her core identity - who doesn’t want to play the fearless Yordle striking hammer-induced terror into enemies across the map? In fact, the gap between her awesome premise and lackluster execution is exactly why we’re working on her.
Artistically, Poppy will still look like a heavily armed and armored ball of golden death. We’re looking to preserve her thematic and color scheme while bringing her art up-to-date both technically and stylistically. Similarly, there’s a lot to love in her story, we just plan to bring it up-to-date and cement her more firmly in the world and among her fellow Yordles. On the gameplay front the challenge is a bit bigger, as Poppy’s kit is pretty archaic at this point. Nevertheless, we’re looking to keep her current fearless style of gameplay and core dash-and-smash mechanics - we still want her to have that same diver mentality.
Poppy is definitely a hefty undertaking - not quite a Sion-level project but pretty close to it. She’s still a ways out and is going to take a lot of work, but will hopefully offer an awesome experience for players once we’re done with the job.
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As I’ve mentioned, these and other updates will vary tremendously in scope as we tailor them to each champion’s unique needs and opportunities. Keep in mind that this is nowhere near an exhaustive list of our current projects, and if your favorite older champion isn’t included, fear not! He/she/it is somewhere on our radar, and we hope for an even better cadence in 2015 as we continue to incorporate our latest learnings.
We’re incredibly excited about the future of Champion Updates, and we hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration. Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below!"
Ququroon, a member of the champion update team, also popped on to reddit to touch on a few common questions following today's dev blog.
When asked if visual updates for Taric are still planned, Ququroon commented:
"Taric is a troublesome one, like Evelynn. Trust me, there is no shortage of ideas on him, but it's about wading through and figuring out just who our Gem Knight should be, and how to make him the best he can be.
IronStylus has been having some chats with players over on the Boards about him, so don't think we've forgotten Taric, or Taric players."
When asked if this comment means Evelynn's VU is still on the way at some point, Ququroon reiterated:
"Of course. There's no way we'd be satisfied with what's currently in game."
As for the Warwick visual update that has been discussed in the past, Ququroon explained:
"So Warwick is a different issue. We know he has a lot of jank right now, and believe me we want that gone. However, Warwick is a matter of gameplay. I spoke to some of the designers about this, and this is how I understand it.
You may have seen a Warwick kit posted in the past from our favorite ZenonTheStoic, and that was good! However, we still had a few things we're looking to solve on it. Warwick is interesting for a few reasons, because we'd want to maintain his low skill floor, while increasing the ways that he can meaningfully outplay his opponent. Currently he can mostly only outplay his opponent by either passing the lifesteal check or through his itemization.
We want to solve his gameplay problems in a meaningful way, and since that's on the horizon, we don't want to do new art assets, then have to turn around and do them again. We could do a completely different champion with work like that. We have some concepts ready and roaring for Warwick, but these things take time on all sides."
Ququroon also replied to a summoner concerned with the lack of new or updated animations for some of the visual updates such as Renekton or Singed:
"We did formerly do exclusively complete packages, but we also did less in the past. It's a balancing act of quality vs quantity. This gives us a world where Maokai is updated though, rather than not any time soon.
We have a lot of things to get through. A looooot. We do plan accordingly on the champion though. Whereas Maokai needed less animation love, someone like Blitzcrank would need much more.
I hope you can understand. >u<"
He continued:
"Animation isn't neglected, but I can agree with your fear that things that receive partial updates won't have it updated until later on. With some exceptions, we generally try to hit the worst offenders, then move on to another offender.
I'll use Singed as an example here. Singed needs updates on his VFX, Animation and VO (though this one works a little differently). His model WAS his worst offender, and that's no longer the case. He is now a much better character by bumping up his bottom line, but that doesn't change the fact that he needs updates elsewhere. However, I can point to several characters that are much more offensive than Singed is on those areas. This doesn't change the fact that Singed needs the work, it just means that we have to change our focus onto those that do.
The current pace means that we'll keep pushing up our worst offenders, be that offense on a specific area of art, thematics or gameplay. As that bottom line increases, the ones that we hit as a partial will become the new bottom line in that area, and will be hit with it. We absolutely love shipping complete packages (really! It gives a much bigger and better impression, which leads to players enjoying all the work more as a whole), but we also want to get through everything. As we move on, we'll continue to explore ways to address the backlog in different ways, including hitting partial work.
Also, we'll totally hit TF's icons at some point. They're currently used as an example of bad icons in the game. (Though I'd want to keep that ult icon in somewhere)
(Also, because I touched on it. VO works a bit differently, because while it can be a bandwidth issue, it also requires much more exploration and diving into the character. This can cause it to take much more time, especially on characters with more beloved VO.)"
Riot Xiphiase also added in:
"Just wanted to jump in and add that at the heart of this is just a complicated resource allocation problem. I'm seeing a lot of "no x champion? and what about y champion?" We hear you guys and know there's a lot of stuff to modernize. We're reminded of that every day when we play ourselves.
The problem is that there are only so many Rioters able to work on these updates and we don't have 30 hours in a day. We want to ensure that we're tackling pressing issues and to the extent we can maybe address a few offenders immediately at the expense of a different larger, more comprehensive update is a tricky balance we have to manage.
At the end of the day, just because we didn't call out a specific champion doesn't mean we aren't aware that they may need a little bit of love (or even a lot of love). There's a lot to get to but we're doing our best!"
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