Developer Riot Lexical provides an update on state of the League of Legends champions team and Skarner VGU

Riot Lexical, a Riot Games developer, has provided information on the League of Legends champions team and Skarner VGU's current status. The champions' rework (ASU, VGU, and mini-rework) has been postponed for about a year. Thus, these changes are long overdue.

Riot Lexical stated that she joined the League of Legends champions team a year ago when the team suffered from the downstream effects of COVID. She further stated that Zeri, Renata, and Udyr were all pushed farther out to accommodate the many disciplines that had the other devs down due to illness, needing time to work on life changes, or leaving the team.

According to her, it became painfully clear that they were reacting to changes rather than planning for themselves as a team. Many team members have been there for over a decade, and it became a red flag.

Riot Lexical recognizes the need to slow down and regroup to build a better and more productive future. Many of their fields require reconstruction, as many of the older members went above and beyond to assist in developing a new generation of developers on the team.

Thus, the good news is that the team has many fresh faces and skills eager to see what the League of Legends community thinks of future releases.

She did have some bad news, as she admitted that the team could not develop League of Legends champions or updates when disciplines were lacking. They need engineers, designers, artists, stories, VO teams, and so on to execute projects. If they are down to one discipline, that is their bottleneck.

She informed everyone that the team has been focused on delivering as much as possible to the players and that knowledge transmission has taken a back seat. However, she mentioned they can now see the light at the end of the tunnel as their team has become more established and everyone is fully onboarded.

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Riot Lexical provides further updates on League of Legends champions and Skarner VGU

Riot Lexical mentioned that champion updates (VUs, ASUs, and VGUs) are more complicated than creating a new champion. Not only do the former champions have a slew of relationships to re-examine, but their IP now extends well beyond League of Legends. The update allows them to re-establish world-building around the champions while delving further into what worked and didn't.

She said several ground rules must be established before they can begin updating the graphics. Because a knowledge-based job is difficult to solve with more individuals as refinement and revision, require time.

Production pipelines, on the other hand, may have accelerated. Riot Lexical hopes that by working on the production muscles, they will be able to lay more groundwork for the League of Legends champions, so they are ready to go into production. She was hesitant to offer any commitments, but she did confirm that further changes are in the works.

About the Skarner VGU update, she mentioned that owing to the huge scope of Udyr, VGUs has been pushed back. After the publication of Udyr in August, they began work on Skarner.

Unfortunately, the polls concluded last year when they were quite short on several disciplines, with the new League of Legends designers onboarding, the animation team rebuilding, and audio and narrative being stretched thin.

Skarner is a difficult champion to update owing to how many champions Hextech and the Bracken Touch (Camile, Seraphine). Furthermore, there was a lot that wasn't working for Skarner in League of Legends, according to Riot Lexical.

She seemed to acknowledge that the champion is at the bottom of the thematic fun among all champions, making it necessary to do something new to elevate Skarner to the arthropod that some League of Legends fans may appreciate.

She went on to say that her team has examined a lot of concepts, kits, and story approaches and that they might have found an interesting one. It will still take some time for them to flesh out the new direction and complete Skarner.

She won't reveal anything for the time being, as she pledged to keep the community updated on the dev blog, as Skarner will be in a different state than before.

She concluded her remarks by stating that they lost their Narrative SME when filming LOL PLS in November. Now that their Narrative lead has arrived, they can assist in disentangling the webs that connect the current crystal scorpion and the future brand-new Skarner.

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It would be interesting to see how the League of Legends developers keep their word after failing to keep their previous promises and making fans wait for long periods.