With the ninth season of League of Legends coming to a close, developer Riot Games is teasing the upcoming gameplay changes for the preseason period prior to Season 10. Included is a focus on creating more environmental variety and an increase in detailed gameplay interactions with and around the map.
Riot explained that League of Legends’ greatest strengths are variety and mastery. Variety being the expansive selection of champions and decisions available to players, and mastery representing the time it takes to learn those champions and how best to make those decisions.
In previous seasons, Riot has slowly added new elements to Summoner’s Rift. Changes like the honey fruit and elemental drakes are both examples of the kind of environmental variation Riot wishes to add more of. Season 10 could see this expanded even further.
As for mastery, League of Legends has historically been a macro-oriented game, with team skills like wave management and objective trading being critical to victory. Riot wants to balance this out by giving more opportunities to master micro gameplay on an individual level, with things like terrain changes that allow more playmaking during the heat of combat.
Riot wants to give League of Legends players not only more opportunities for skill expression, but also a greater variety of experiences from game to game. Many matches can closely mirror each other in flow and playstyle, so by altering details of the game’s environments, games might feel more varied.
The exact nature of the changes that might be made to the Summoner’s Rift environment have yet to be discussed, but fans are already speculating. It’s possible that the 2019 World Championship will be the final time fans see the current iteration of Summoner’s Rift played by the world’s greatest teams and players.
While environmental changes are their focus of the upcoming preseason, more changes will also be coming to alter support items, increase the potency of dragon buffs, and offer new keystone options.
Riot will be exploring these preseason changes in-depth during the 10th Anniversary Riot Plz, which will arrive on October 15th. The changes themselves are just around the corner and will be hitting the main client with patch 9.23 in November.
