League of Legends legend “Phreak” uploaded a nearly two hour video detailing the upcoming release of League Classic. Phreak was contracted (or re-contracted) by Riot Games to return to the development team to help build-up the League of Legends classic game mode roughly four months ago.
There’s been about as much controversy surrounding the game mode as there’s been excitement thanks to Riot’s mismanagement of certain aspects of Classic. Namely, the fact that the game used modern champion skins and animations by default in the game mode instead of having the classic look to their kits made players consider tossing Molotov cocktails at the nearest passersby in modest frustration. This has since been a rescinded decision, but players should know that the classic game mode isn’t going to be an OSRS-style reconstruction that is “pure”. Instead, Classic is going to be an amalgamation of old gameplay mixed with the contemporary engine.
In his video, Phreak states:
…all of this was built in the modern engine. At the end of the day, um, there’s a lot of stuff like, I dunno, hardware compatibility… security upgrades and whatever, and also just ‘game feel’ stuff… at the end of the day, this was all built in the modern engine.
Phreak goes on to so say that Riot has the ability to sort through all of the content from season three, and that part of his role was transferring that content onto the modern engine and to make sure that it felt more or less correct. This explains why Riot was keen on using the default, modern skins and selling classic skins on the side instead of just defaulting to the old skins in the first place: those old skins aren’t the default skins because League Classic isn’t a game mode that will be played in an old build. It’s a brand new, modern build replicating the mechanics and items from season 3, roughly.
I say roughly because certain things in League Classic are going to be from seasons three, some things will be from season four, and some things will have existed before that time.
In essence, though, the fact that League Classic will be featured on the modern engine means that some things will simply not accurately replicate the feeling of a true season three Summoner’s Rift. And that isn’t just because of the item and mechanic tuning, but instead because the modern engine is just going to feel different. Simple as that.
Additionally, Phreak stated that the game will have modern visualization, which immediately stands out as a potential, long-term downside to this League Classic experiment.
To bring back the OSRS comparison for a moment;
Old School Runescape’s fundamental strategy at its inception was to replicate Runescape from 2007. Nothing more. This was important at the time because players didn’t want to play RS3, but with 2007 tuning; they wanted to play the game exactly as it was in 2007. And, in fact, they stopped playing after a while because the content just wasn’t satiating enough to keep them logged in.
Later into OSRS’s release, the same year, Jagex released the God Wars Dungeon, which wasn’t included in the game files from which OSRS was spawned. Again, OSRS was a nearly pure replica of the game from its source files: there weren’t any modern engine changes to account for security or game feel at all, which meant there wasn’t any content “tacked on” for fun purposes.
All of this is important to note because, eventually, the playerbase for OSRS not only came back, but today is much higher than RS3’s and on a consistent basis because Jagex was able to update OSRS in a direction that the playerbase much prefers over the direction that RS3 went in. And this was only possible because they started from an absolutely pure slate.
I had high hopes for League Classic to be exactly that sort of experiment. But I feel that, because of the shaky start we’ve already gotten with Classic skins being purchasable instead of default, and the modern engine changing the “game feel” right off the rip, we’re going to get something that’s less a long-term experiment and more a short-term gimmick.
I’m hoping that I’m wrong.
GLHF,
-E
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