League of Legends undergoing mass texture overhaul

Riot announced a while back that its working on updating the Summoner’s Rift map, but it looks like that was just the first step. Now the company says that many League of Legends Champions will undergo certain changes as well. Don’t worry, Riot isn’t planning on changing any abilities or stats right as the changes they announced recently are merely cosmetic. The point is to make the Champions look good regardless of the map they’re on because many of the older ones were created using the Summoner’s Rift look and color palette and they only seem to fit on that particular map. The changes will happen over time, but Riot’s main goal is to update the textures of most Champions that were added to League of Legends prior to 2013.

“We’re talking just about every champion and skin released before 2013 (with a few outliers),” Riot said. “This may seem scary, but I want to emphasize that these will generally be small tweaks; corrections rather than major changes. Due to the scale of the project, this won’t all be coming at once, so don’t despair if you don’t see your favorite champion in the first batch! This then ties back to the update to SR, as one of our primary goals with the update is fleshing out LoL’s visual hierarchy. Put simply, this means that particles should have the highest visibility, followed by characters, then finally the environment and map. Rebalancing characters’ colors and textures gives us the chance to also better execute within that visual hierarchy.”

By hierarchy, Riot means that the visual changes will be focused on highlighting some of the Champions most important areas such as the head and the weapons. Also, they plan on making everything as consistent as possible so that it doesn’t distract players from the League of Legends gameplay, which is obviously a bit more important than the art. As for the skins, only a few of them will be updated as Riot feels that most of the recent ones are already on par in terms of quality. Finally, Riot assures us that the texture overhaul wont affect any other League of Legends projects like Champion Updates and the like.