Gaming
GDC 2015: How eSports shapes League of Legends
GDC 2015, or the Game Developers Conference, has been invaded by GeekReply! Yep, that’s right! Yours truly has managed to infiltrate this incredible week long gaming extravaganza featuring professionals from all over the world who gather to share, learn, and discuss all facets of video game development. This morning I had the pleasure of sitting in on a fascinating discussion where Riot Games Design Lead, Ryan “Morello” Scott, chatted about the impact that eSports has had on the League of Legends design team. For those of you who don’t know, eSports is not the name of a sports bar internet cafe, but is the official term used for competitive gaming. The popularity of eSports has exploded in recent years (much like putting Peeps in a microwave), thanks to multiplayer online battle arena or MOBA games like League of Legends.
Competitive League of Legends players dream of snagging the top prize at the League of Legends World Championship that last year drew over 27 million viewers worldwide and was cast in 19 different languages. Millions of League of Legends and eSports fans watched the top teams in the world battle it out for the $1 million dollar prize. As you can imagine, the League of Legends team at Riot Games feels the pressure that comes with such intensive worldwide attention, massive corporate sponsorship and more. Here’s some insight into how Riot Games balances eSports’ rigorous demands while still ensuring that they have an enjoyable game.
One of the biggest challenges that Design Lead Ryan Scott mentioned was how to ensure that League of Legends could still be enjoyable for both the casual gamers and the most serious and competitive League players. How does Riot do that? They selectively insulate their game design processes from outside influences like competitive LoL players. Riot takes the ‘mentos and diet coke’ approach when involving high level players into the design processes meaning that they only mix the two when they want to have a blast. Why? This is because that highly competitive players have very focused goals (like winning, duh) whereas the Riot design team wants to create a fun and rich gaming experience that can be enjoyed by diverse group of players. So when does Riot reach out to their super advanced community? Testing is one instance where Riot turns on the Bat, er, LoL signal to summon top tier LoL players to help. Since Riot has been mostly reactionary in balancing and making adjustments to gameplay, they hope that with the help of diamond level LoL players they can be more proactive in future League designs.
Another way that Riot wants to ensure that LoL remains an engaging and fun game is by working to keep business and pleasure separate. This has been more of a priority as LoL’s popularity as an eSport draws large sums of money. Ryan Scott said that the Riot’s designers take a K.I.S.S. approach to their design but not in the gross Gene Simmons tongue kind of way, but in that they Keep It Simple, Stupid. They design the game with the core idea that if you make cool stuff that people want to buy, they’ll buy it. And if League of Legends’ eSports popularity is any indication, it would appear that the gaming community likes the way the Riot Design Team K.I.S.S.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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