Reshaping Runeterra: How Riot Games Rebuilt Their Lore

I was in high school when I played League of Legends for the first time. A friend of mine was obsessed with the game, and recommended I check it out. I very quickly discovered that I was not particularly good at MOBAs, but, being the lore-obsessed teenager that I was, I couldn’t resist investigating what the game’s story had to offer. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far. At the time, the narrative structure of League of Legends operated in a manner that was entirely foreign to me. It was so fundamentally different from what I was expecting that I became lost almost immediately, and quickly decided that the whole thing wasn’t worth my time.

Years passed, and any memories of that brief and puzzling foray into the world Riot Games had created faded to the back of my mind. Then, about a year ago, the release of Teamfight Tactics and Legends of Runeterra drew me back into the world of League of Legends, and I decided to give the lore another chance. It didn’t take me long to realize that things were very different from how I left them. Gone were the idiosyncrasies that had baffled me in the past, and in their place was a robust and complex world, more structurally reminiscent of Tolkien’s Middle Earth than what I had seen all those years before. As it turned out, not long after I left League of Legends behind, Riot Games decided that the state of their game’s lore was untenable. And so, to the displeasure of many fans, they began the arduous process of tearing down the lore of their old world and building it anew.

Runeterra’s Ragnarok

Before the rework, the lore of League of Legends functioned in a way that was fairly unique when compared to other competitive video games. It was set in Runeterra, a vast and diverse world that was nearly torn apart by constant arcane warfare. In order to prevent the total destruction of their planet, the various nations of Runeterra formed the “League of Legends” (hence the name of the game) to help solve international disputes. Powerful mages known as “summoners” would call forth champions to fight on behalf of their respective nations on the Fields of Justice.

If you are familiar at all with League of Legends, you’ve probably already realized that this in-game story was directly analogous to how the game is actually played. During gameplay, the player takes on the role of a Summoner and, using their chosen champion, attempts to best their opponents in an arena known as the Fields of Justice. In essence, the player became a character within the game, one that was a separate entity from the champion they were controlling.

In the majority of games, player immersion does not function like that. Most of the time, the goal is for the player to feel as though they and their in-game avatar are one and the same, skipping the extra step. For example, in a role-playing game like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, the player creates a character and then plays through the game as though they were that person—not a separate, god-like entity that controls their actions.

In PVP games, like League of Legends, this relationship usually isn’t as strong. More focus is put on the competitive aspects of gameplay, and total immersion is far less important. Some of these games don’t have a story mode at all, and instead build their lore using material outside of the game itself. That said, the basic conceit is still generally the same. Lore-wise, you are playing as the character, not as someone controlling them. In some ways, Riot’s unique approach was the more immersive of the two. After all, it mirrors reality far more closely. The idea that you as a player are a sort of wizard, controlling the character from afar, isn’t too far from the truth.

However, it turns out that there is a reason video game lore generally does not operate using this framework. After five years of working within its confines, Riot’s narrative team found that it created numerous inextricable problems. And so, in 2014, they made a decision that would change the course of their worldbuilding forever: they were going to retcon everything relating to the League of Legends, including the concept of Summoners, in order to reshape Runeterra’s narrative in a more conventional manner.

To explain the rationale behind this decision, the narrative team released a Dev Blog titled “Exploring Runeterra”, written by Rioter Tommy Gnox. In the post, Gnox outlines two primary factors that influenced their thinking. The first was a problem created by the mere existence of Summoners within the game. Gnox and the narrative team believed their presence gave the impression that the champions were “little more than puppets manipulated by godlike powers.” Gnox doesn’t elaborate further, but I think his meaning is relatively simple to discern.

Basically, the Summoners were so powerful in the old lore that their presence took away from the idea that the champions were characters in and of themselves, with their own complex stories. The champions became subservient to the Summoners in the narrative in much the same way that they were subservient to the player in-game. This relationship had the effect of minimizing the stories that the Narrative Team was trying to tell, and shifting the focus onto the Summoners, who were, due to their role as in-universe analogues for the players, intentionally left faceless.

The narrative team’s other concern was a problem that they encountered whenever they decided to introduce a new champion. Every playable character they introduced needed a reason to join the League of Legends. The unfortunate consequence of this restriction was that, if the narrative team had an idea for a champion that couldn’t be shoehorned into that framework, then they would have to discard it. This constraint caused Runeterra to feel, in Gnox’s words, “small, and eventually less interesting,” a problem that was only compounded as more and more champions were forced to occupy a similar narrative space.

The running theme between those two points is that the narrative team felt that the concepts of the League of Legends and of Summoners were, as Gnox put it, “restricting the potential narrative development of the game’s defining characters.” Tearing down the old narrative structure would give them more room to expand the stories of their champions in ways that were unavailable to them before. To me, that seems reasonable, although I do have hindsight on my side. Unfortunately for Riot, the community disagreed with their thought process, and the decision, regardless of the reasoning behind it was… poorly received, to say the least.

The Response of an Angry Fanbase

There was perhaps no better visual for the community’s response to the retcon than the official League of Legends message board post for Gnox’s Dev Blog. It was a solid wall of criticism; the post itself had hundreds of downvotes, as did every comment from the narrative team attempting to explain their decision. Not everyone responded so negatively, of course, but there was certainly more criticism than praise by a significant margin. I would love to show some of the responses on that post to you, or at least encourage you to read them for yourself, as many of them were quite entertaining. Unfortunately, while I was in the process of writing this article, Riot permanently shut down their message boards, deleting all of those comments in the process. So, you’ll just have to take me at my word on this one. However, what I can do is relay three general criticisms made by fans both on the official message board and on other websites such as Reddit and Mobafire.

A common sentiment among the community was the idea that the retcon was removing a core piece of what made League of Legends unique. While this criticism is undeniably true, I will point out that “unique” doesn’t necessarily equal “good”. Not every scientific experiment will lead to a new discovery, and most genetic mutations don’t result in fish walking on land. Sometimes, taking a unique approach simply doesn’t work out. That doesn’t mean that Riot’s old system wasn’t worth trying; I certainly don’t intend to disparage creativity in an industry in which it is often lacking. However, I think Gnox’s Dev Blog made it clear that their unique take on video game storytelling had serious flaws, and its uniqueness alone wasn’t enough to compensate for the difficulties that it caused.

Another, more vitriolic assertion was that the narrative team was retconning the old lore because (to quote a Redditor who will remain nameless) they weren’t “good enough writers to flesh out the world [they] created in the first place.” Even if you ignore the fact that this comment is unnecessarily combative and somewhat insulting, it also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the creative process works.

It is certainly true that limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, can force writers to find creative solutions in order to work around them. That said, if your goal is to create an expansive and diverse world, you shouldn’t intentionally hamstring your creative process without a very good reason. And as I have already said, in this particular case, I don’t believe that there were enough benefits of the old system to warrant such sacrifices.

The final concern that I will mention here, and one that I think is far more reasonable, was less about the retcon itself and more about its long-term implementation. Fans were worried that certain champions, such as Fiddlestick, whose lore was intrinsically tied to the existence of the League, would be left directionless in the wake of the retcon. This concern proved to be not entirely unwarranted. Riot has been notoriously slow in updating older champions over the last several years, to the extent that several champions are still in the unpolished state in which they found themselves immediately after the retcon. That said, while this criticism clearly had a certain amount of veracity to it, it doesn’t mean that the retcon itself was a bad idea. After all, these neglected champions are the ones that would benefit the most from a narrative rework, at least in theory. Where before their entire identities were absorbed by their connection to the League of Legends, they could now be given their own stories and personalities.

I’m not the only one who believes retconning the old lore was the right call to make. Before I started writing this piece, I spoke with Rioter Rowan Parker, better known online as L4T3NCY, to get his opinions on some of the recent developments in relating to the future of Runeterra’s storyline. L4T3NCY is the Creative Director of Riot Forge, the recently announced publishing division within Riot Games. Riot Forge works with outside game studios to create new titles within the League of Legends universe, and L4T3NCY is responsible for keeping Runeterra consistent across those new games, as well as deciding which story arcs to tell. During our conversation, I decided to ask him what he thought of the retcon. Although he wasn’t involved in making the decision, L4T3NCY was working for Riot at the time, and looking back, he provided his own perspective:

“My personal feeling is that it needed to be done for us to get to where we are now. It laid the foundation for compelling world-building  which is starting to pay off in the amazing story-telling we’ve been seeing lately in comics, stories, cool videos, etc.”

L4T3NCY’s statement gets to the crux of both Gnox’s explanation in the Dev Blog, and the reasoning that I have attempted to present above: that the retcon was necessary if Riot were to achieve their final vision for Runeterra, a vision that is only now beginning to materialize. And I think Riot deserves praise for making what was undoubtedly a difficult, and certainly unpopular, decision. The old narrative was undeniably flawed, it’s true. But there was nothing preventing Riot from simply sticking with the status quo indefinitely, adding new champions to the League of Legends in a perpetual cycle. Instead, they decided to break free from their self-imposed narrative chains in the hopes of building something better.

The Pitfalls Along the Way

Whether you agree with the retcon or not, it’s clearly far too late for Riot to reverse their decision. What we can do is look back at what the narrative team did with their newfound creative freedom. And while I firmly believe that the changes they made were generally positive, the rebuild has not gone perfectly. There are undeniably parts of Runeterra’s story that have been handled poorly over the last six years.

To be fair, the occasional misstep on Riot’s part should come as no surprise. Managing the vast lore of League of Legends was never going to be an easy task. When I asked him about those challenges, L4T3NCY described the difficulties of the situation perfectly:

“There are so many champions and factions and stories that navigating history is almost a job in and of itself. If we’re not careful, we could accidentally contradict an existing story and create confusion about a champion’s personality or motivations. When telling new stories, we’re also trying to factor in what we know players are excited to hear and experience from their favorite champs, where they think stories might head, and then trying to surprise and delight them along the way.”

If the game had a smaller roster of champions, these concerns would be more manageable. On average, Riot unveils about five champions per year, and each of them is released with a profile detailing their background, as well as a short story that expands on the character. With the roster swelling to 148 champions earlier this year, keeping track of them all, and giving each of them the love and care that they deserve, becomes increasingly difficult. 

Despite these challenges, I believe that the majority of the post-retcon champions are well-designed (at least in a narrative sense. Don’t yell at me about balance, that’s not my department). Champions like Jhin and Ornn represent some of the narrative team’s best work; they are unique conceptually, and the stories Riot has told about them do an excellent job of weaving them into the overall narrative. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Bard, for example, has almost no lore whatsoever despite being created after the retcon took place. However, for the most part I think it’s fair to say that the majority of League of Legends’ newer champions are reasonably well-integrated into Runeterra’s story.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about several of the champions created before the retcon. In some cases, they received only cursory integration into the new storyline and were then abandoned with assurances of updates at some point down the line. In some cases, those promises have come to fruition, but it has taken far longer than some might have hoped. Fiddlesticks and Volibear finally received full lore reworks earlier this year. However, many others, such as Cho’Gath, Corki, and Shaco, to name a few, are still waiting for their time in the spotlight, with their lore currently only consisting of a few short paragraphs. While the narrative team has responsibilities beyond champion updates, in an ideal world they would still be happening faster.

Neglect isn’t the only lore-related problem created problems for Riot over the last six years. It’s probably the most common, but there have certainly been times where Riot made a real attempt to integrate a champion into the new canon and fumbled the execution. The best example of a champion to suffer this fate is probably Gragas. Before the retcon took place, his lore was very simple. A rowdy loner, fond of fighting and drinking, he brewed his own ale using a font of magical power. The constant imbibing of that special creation caused him to increase dramatically in size, standing over seven feet tall. His propensity for drunken brawls eventually attracted the attention of the League of Legends and he proceeded to fight on their behalf. And that was pretty much it. Not a particularly inspired story, but a functional one given the narrow state of the lore at the time.

In most ways, very little changed for Gragas after the retcon. The only real difference in his backstory now lies in the origin of his magic ale. Instead of using a magical fountain, the drink’s magical properties now come from a shard of True Ice that Gragas uses to keep his ale chilled at the perfect temperature. True Ice is an incredibly rare substance, so dangerous that for most people a single touch would result in death. The people of the frozen region of Freljord use it to create powerful magic weapons for an elite class of warrior known as the Iceborn, who are capable of tolerating the bitter chill.

Gragas is not canonically an Iceborn, so how he can handle true ice without dying, or why it grants his ale magical properties rather than, say, freezing it instantly, is unclear. Technically speaking, there’s nothing in the lore that says those effects couldn’t happen. True Ice does have some magical properties, although how they work isn’t fully explained. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that it could imbue Gragas’ ale with magic. Similarly, Gragas could, unbeknownst to us, be an Iceborn, explaining his resistance to True Ice and how he can walk around in the snow shirtless without freezing to death. However, none of those potential solutions are stated anywhere in Gragas’ lore, so we are left with an incomplete, confusing picture of the champion.

It would be bad enough if a poorly thought out backstory was Gragas’ only problem. But perhaps even worse is the fact that he hasn’t been given anything to do with his magically enhanced abilities. The only impact he has on the larger story of Runeterra involves him getting into a drunken brawl and accidentally solving a dispute between several Freljordian tribes. That idea could make an excellent short story, but it is instead relegated to a footnote in Gragas’ biography. The overall result, unfortunately, is a champion that somehow manages to be poorly integrated into the lore, while simultaneously barely being integrated at all.

Reinvigorating Older Champions

While the vastness and complexity of the League of Legends universe has caused its fair share of trouble, it has its benefits as well. As L4T3NCY puts it, “The world of Runeterra is so large and diverse, it’s really a great place for epic storytelling beyond the rift. The foundations we’ve been laying for years are ready to support some complex and interweaving stories that will hopefully move our champions and the world forward.”

Riot has used that foundation to their advantage on numerous occasions. It is certainly not the case that every pre-retcon champion has been abandoned in the same fashion as Shaco or Gragas, their stories left to gather dust in some dark corner of Riot’s offices. In fact, some of them have thrived in the new framework. In the modern canon, Jax represents the clearest example. Of the pre-retcon champions, his story was easily one of the most difficult to adapt, in part because of its simplicity, and in part because he was one of the aforementioned champions whose lore was intrinsically tied to the old narrative. His lore was adjusted slightly a few times even before the retcon, but to avoid getting too far into the weeds, I’ll just give you the basic idea. 

In the old canon, Jax was a mysterious warrior, the most powerful that the League of Legends had ever seen. He was so powerful, in fact, that the League’s High Council mandated that he must fight only with a brass lamppost to keep opposing Summoners from complaining. Despite that dramatic restriction, Jax remained nearly unbeatable in battle. Much like Gragas, those basic details were the extent of Jax’s development.

Translating that story into a world in which the League does not exist, and where lampposts are few and far between, was never going to be an easy task. Despite the obvious challenges, Riot managed to create a new backstory for Jax that incorporated him naturally into the post-retcon storyline while keeping most of his core characteristics intact. In the new canon, he is the last warrior of an ancient civilization that was destroyed by the corrupting influences of the Void, a timeless evil that seeks to devour all of Runeterra.

Now, in the present, he roams the world, searching for warriors strong enough to join him in his quest to defeat the Void once and for all. It’s a compelling story, one that maintains Jax’s persona as a mysterious warrior while giving him significantly more backstory than he had before. The narrative team even managed to recontextualize his lamppost in a plausible way, turning it into a magical stave, burning with elemental fire capable of harming the creatures that brought ruin to his homeland. In short, it’s everything you could possibly want from a rework.

Champions in need of a complete rework weren’t the only ones to benefit from the retcon. Riot has also spent time expanding the lore of already well-established champions, and of their world in general. I’ll use Zed as my example here, because I think the changes in his lore paint the clearest picture. Prior to his post-retcon rework, Zed was essentially evil incarnate. As a child, an orphaned Zed was taken in and trained by a ninja master of the Kinkou Order, an organization dedicated to preserving the balance between the material and spiritual realms within the nation of Ionia. Zed proved to be a gifted student; his only equal was the master’s own son, Shen. Every sparring match between the two ended in a draw. Hoping to break the stalemate and earn his master’s favor, Zed sought out forbidden techniques hidden deep within the Kinkou temple, where he found a box containing the secrets to shadow magic.

Armed with these new abilities, Zed was able to best his longtime rival. However, his master realized what Zed had done, and banished him from the order. Zed was forced to leave the box behind and traveled alone for years, his bitterness and ambition only growing. He gathered followers before returning to the temple, set on taking the box by force and perfecting his control over the dark magic it contained. When he arrived, he found his former master waiting for him. The old man welcomed Zed back with open arms and invited him inside, explaining that he had failed Zed by banishing him, and encouraged him to destroy the box and restore balance.

Zed rejected the offer, emerging from the temple carrying the master’s severed head. He then ordered his followers to slaughter most of the members of the Kinkou Order, founding the Order of Shadows in its place. In this version of the story, Zed is essentially an irredeemable villain. He murders and betrays those who once trusted him and becomes a literal avatar of darkness. It’s difficult to imagine a more one-dimensional character.

However, after his 2018 lore rework, and with the release of his eponymous comic book series earlier this year, Zed saw a massive shift in his characterization (warning: the upcoming section contains major spoilers for Zed’s comic book series). His origins are essentially the same: an orphaned child is adopted by a ninja master as his pupil, and he eventually turns to shadow magic in search of greater power. A few things changed, though. For one, Zed’s childhood relationship with Shen is transformed from one of jealousy to a friendly sibling rivalry. This change not only serves to humanize Zed, making him a more believable character, but it also gives his later betrayal more impact. More importantly, the motivations behind that betrayal are now completely different. Years after first joining the Kinkou order, Ionia was invaded by the neighboring empire of Noxus. Faced with the destruction of his home nation, Zed sought the power of the shadows to aid him in fighting back.

At this point, Zed arrived at a crossroads. He needed the power to defend his people, but also firmly believed in the Kinkou Order’s mission to maintain the balance between worlds. The Kinkou were officially neutral in the war. Their mission was merely to maintain balance, not to judge and kill for one side or the other. Zed knew that if he simply abandoned the Kinkou and took the box without killing his former master, many of the Order’s other members, Shen included, would have joined him in the fight against Noxus. The Kinkou would become no better than mercenaries and assassins, their ideals permanently tainted. Zed had no problem corrupting himself, but he wanted to avoid dragging the rest of the Order down with him.

To reconcile those two disparate convictions, Zed convinced his master to stage his assassination at Zed’s hands. Zed and his followers then proceeded to kill many members of the Kinkou Order and escape with the box. In this way, Zed turned himself into a villain, severing all ties between himself, Shen, and the remaining members of the Kinkou, thereby ensuring that the Order’s ideals would remain untarnished while still gaining the power he needed to protect Ionia.

The rewrite of Zed’s backstory did not turn him into a noble hero; far from it, in fact. He is still an assassin, one willing to commit all manner of heinous acts in defense of his home. But by changing his motivations, Riot transformed him from a character that was evil for evil’s sake into an antihero with understandable motivations. Not everyone will like that new direction, but it is undeniable that Zed is a far more complex and well-developed character than he was before the retcon.

The common thread between these successful two updates, and others that I have not mentioned here, is that the champions weren’t just smoothly incorporated into the new canon. Instead, the narrative team expanded on their stories, granting them greater depth than they ever had in the old lore. And they managed to accomplish this feat without sacrificing what made them interesting in the first place.

The examples I have presented so far, both good and bad, represent the extreme ends of the spectrum. As is the case with many large-scale endeavors, much of Riot’s work in rebuilding the world of League of Legends over the last six years falls somewhere in between. Looking at the current state of Runeterra’s lore, I would argue that their efforts have trended more positive than negative, especially in recent years. The lore updates have increased in frequency and quality, and their partnership with Marvel Comics has expanded their universe and given new dimensions to previously uninteresting characters. That said, fans who have been following the game since the retcon, and therefore been forced to endure what has undeniably been a slow process, might think otherwise. Fortunately for them, Riot recently provided us with numerous reasons to believe that the pace of their storytelling will see a dramatic increase in the not-so-distant future.

Looking to the Future

In October of last year, Riot held a livestream to celebrate League of Legends’ 10th anniversary. During the event, and in subsequent updates from the developers, they announced some big plans for the future of their game, many of which could have an enormous impact on its lore. 

One of the revealed projects, and one that has been available to the public for a while now, was Legends of Runeterra, a card game based on League of Legends. Normally, a card game wouldn’t be the most obvious source for new lore. However, it was later confirmed that the game’s flavor text and in-game dialogue were actually canon, revealing a veritable gold-mine of previously unknown information, including the introduction of many never-before-seen side characters. Riot also announced, and have since released, an animated video series titled Tales of Runeterra, which, as the name implies, tell brief stories about the various regions within the world of League of Legends, adding more life to the ever-expanding universe.

Those announcements contained numerous interesting details for hardcore fans of Runeterra’s lore, but they didn’t have any major repercussions that would push the overarching story forward. Those who are only casually invested in the lore might not even have noticed the changes. Fortunately, those were far from the only projects Riot had planned for the 10th anniversary event.

Let’s start with Project L and Project F, a pair of games so far from completion that they don’t even have proper titles. Almost nothing about either of them has been revealed, but Riot gave us a sneak peek at what might be coming at some point down the line. The first, Project L, is going to be a fighting game set in the League of Legends universe. From a lore perspective, this game likely does not seem particularly promising, as fighting games often do not contain particularly complex storylines. That said, given the amount of lore present in Legends of Runeterra, I wouldn’t be too surprised if Project L has more impact on Runterra’s story than we might expect.

We know even less about Project F, having seen only brief glimpses during the livestream. However, based solely on that limited information, it seems likely that it will contain significantly more lore than its counterpart. The game appears to be a co-operative action-RPG in the same vein as Diablo or Path of Exile, a genre that often contains in-depth worldbuilding. Unfortunately, because we know so little about it, the most we can do regarding Project F is say that it shows promise, and hope that it delivers on its potential when it arrives some years from now.

Also revealed at the 10th Anniversary event was Riot Forge. As I mentioned previously, Riot Forge is a publishing wing within Riot Games that will be working with external game studios in order to create new titles set in the world of Runeterra. At the same time, Riot also announced two games they are planning to publish under Riot Forge’s banner. The first, The Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, will be a single-player, turn-based strategy game set in the regions of Bilgewater and the Shadow Isles. It will take place shortly after the “Burning Tides” event, which saw the apparent death of the champion Gangplank at the hands of the aptly-named Miss Fortune. Longtime fans will probably remember the event as the time Riot temporarily removed Gangplank from the game, to the displeasure of many.

Given its name, it seems a near-certainty that The Ruined King will finally shed some light on the eponymous Ruined King of the Shadow Isles, a mysterious figure who has existed in the background of Runeterra’s lore for many years, but whose nature has never been truly illuminated. The game’s setting also opens the door for the inclusion of popular characters such as Thresh (whose lantern appears in the trailer), Lucian and Senna, Gangplank, and Miss Fortune, among others.

The details of the second game’s story, an action-platformer titled CONV/RGENCE: A League of Legends Story, are, and you may be noticing a theme here, currently unknown. At the time of writing, we know two things: the protagonist will be the champion Ekko, a teenager with the power to control time, and the game will describe his exploits in Zaun, the City of Iron and Glass. Much like fighting games, platformers aren’t known for complex storytelling, but Ekko is a fascinating character, one whose story has a lot of room to grow. Any narrative development that CONV/RGENCE provides will be a welcome addition.

Even without knowing much about them, I think both The Ruined King and CONV/RGENCE have the potential to bring major changes to Runeterra. However, what really gives me hope for the games, along with other titles produced by Riot Forge, is what L4T3NCY had to say when I asked him about how much impact these new games would have on the story of Runeterra overall.

According to him, unlike in League of Legends, where the story is generally required to take a backseat to the gameplay, lore is going to be one of the primary focuses in the games released by Riot Forge. Exploring new game formats allows Riot to “really do justice to the ‘lore version’ of our champ[ions], in a game genre or gameplay setting that will let them shine.” That alone would be an encouraging claim, but L4T3NCY followed it up with another, even more promising one: “Riot Forge games will have stories that move the universe forward.”

On the surface, those statements might not seem particularly impressive. After all, most games with narratives of some kind will inevitably progress that narrative in some way or another. In this case though, the type of game that League of Legends is makes moving the lore forward inherently difficult. Since none of the characters can die, many stories told within the confines of their universe will end without anything important happening. Riot has gotten better at combating that tendency in recent years, but it remains an obstacle that must be tackled any time they try to progress their narrative.

There was always the concern that the Riot Forge games would fall into this same trap; that they would merely use Runeterra as a backdrop and focus instead on the gameplay, rather than making the lore one of their primary focuses. It is incredibly encouraging to hear that Riot will not be taking that route, and instead prominently feature their champions and their stories in the games produced by Riot Forge.

As excited as I am for the games produced by Riot Forge, the biggest bombshell of the 10th anniversary event was saved for the end, when Riot streamed the trailer for Arcane, their first full-length animated series. The series will be animated by Fortiche Productions, who have worked extensively with Riot in the past, creating animated shorts such as “Get Jinxed” and “POP/STARS,” among others. 

Once again, Riot kept the specific details of the project close to their metaphorical chests. As of now, no one even knows which streaming platform it will be released on. However, in this case the trailer revealed a great deal to fans that knew what to look for. Much like CONV/RGENCE, the series will be set in Zaun, and will focus on the early lives of Jinx and Vi, two of Riot’s most popular champions.

This announcement was exciting for a few reasons. First, it allows long-time fans of the champions the chance to see them in a new format, and to learn more about their favorite characters. Second, much like Riot Forge, it will allow Riot’s narrative team to flex their creative muscles in a new way, creating in-depth, long-form storylines that aren’t possible in the shorter content they usually produce.

The reveal of Arcane wrapped up what was an incredible event for Riot, one that gave fans of their lore more to look forward to than ever before. According to L4T3NCY, the reason they revealed so much new information during the event was to thank players for their contributions to League of Legends during the last ten years, and to “blow their minds” with what they have coming up in the next decade. Between the sheer volume of content they teased, and the numerous new storytelling options they have opened for themselves, it’s fair to say that they succeeded in their goal beyond expectation.

Even fans who weren’t happy with the retcon, or those who haven’t appreciated how Riot has handled the rebuild so far, must admit that these new projects show a great deal of promise. Of course, Riot still needs to turn their vision into reality; potential matters little if it doesn’t result in an end product that is actually worth playing. For now, though, we should be optimistic. Riot’s worldbuilding has improved dramatically since the retcon, and their future plans look to build upon everything they have accomplished during the last six years. So, I think it’s safe to say that, at least from where we currently stand, the future of Runeterra is looking bright.