Riot Games likes to try all sorts of absurd ideas in their development of new champions for League of Legends. In this way, the company wants to allow maximum creative freedom to design interesting champions. An idea for champion Aphelios should interact with the real world.
How does champion designing work? Months pass before a new champion is designed and finally released. On average about 1 year. The designers not only plan the skills and the design, but also the associated story within the LoL world.
During development, however, there is a lot of trial and error between design and capabilities. Riot’s philosophy advocates trying all sorts of ideas when developing new champions, but this also results in crazy ideas that often don’t make it into the actual game.
One of the most important LoL champions also went through several design ideas: LoL: One of the most important champions was born out of a unique relationship.
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What were possible ideas? In a Twitch stream, Lead Champion Designer August Browning shared general design philosophies as well as senior game design manager Bradford “CertainlyT” Wenban’s planned ideas that never made it to the live servers.
CertainlyT was involved with champions Darius, Zyra, Thresh, Yasuo, Kalista, Zoe and Aphelios and also worked on the reworks of Mordekaiser, Graves, Caitlyn, Warwick and Akali. As such, he has been involved with some of the most creative champions in the game.
For example, a second application was planned for Zoe’s Ultimate. A sort of panic button that instead of teleporting back and forth gave Zoe the option to teleport to a random location on the map.
Akali’s rework originally came up with the idea that she could attach to teammates’ projectiles. Probably the most interesting idea came from the ADC Aphelios. Since it is closely associated with the moon in the game lore, the real phases of the moon should also have an influence on the champion.
How should Aphelios work? So it was planned that Aphelios would gain strength depending on the phase of the moon. When the moon is full, it’s the perfect time to peck Aphelios. August Browning describes the basic idea behind it as follows:
However, the idea didn’t make it into the actual game. It’s important to remember that League of Legends is a competitive game at its core, and such mechanics can also diminish the utility of a champion.
Despite all that, Aphelios has become a controversial champion, recently causing a stir at MSI:
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