Another day means even more exciting news from Riot Games. As part of the Season 10 start, League of Legends videos have been released everyday in the past week detailing what's in store for the game. Today, Jonathan "Bellissimoh" Belliss, Product Lead for Personalization on the Dev Team, took the stage to discuss skins and events planned for 2020.
To start, Bellissimoh stated the difficulty of making skins for over 150 champions. This means Riot prioritizes popular champions with larger audiences to delight as many players as possible and support League of Legends through the next decade. However, he noted that champions who haven't received a skin in a while will be getting one as part of the over 120 skin goal in 2020. These individuals are Bard, Karthus, Kindred, Mordekaiser, Nautilus, Ornn, Pantheon, Rek'Sai, Sion, Skarner, Taliyah Taric, Trundle, Twitch, Vel'Koz, and Xerath.
At the same time, Riot will be making skins for their more popular champions like Lux, Ezreal, Ahri, and Kai'Sa once again to aid their ability to craft skins for the smaller-but-dedicated fanbases. As Riot continues to increase its skin production, Bellissimoh says the hope is that players can count the last time their main champion received a skin in months instead of years.
With the increased skin production, Riot will also spend more time exploring new creative thematics. Compared to some beloved thematics, players have shown that they aren't as excited anymore about others through fewer skin purchases, decreased use of those skins in-game, and player surveys around the world. But this doesn't mean thematics like Snowdown are done forever, rather there needs to be reflection and thought on how to generate excitement in the playerbase again such as with the High Noon line.
On that note, the past Lunar Revel events have released skins popular in the East but not so much for the West. As a result, the Mecha Kingdoms event starting today is an attempt to excite all League of Legends players globally by fusing sci-fi with warring kingdoms. Furthermore, Riot is looking to improve interest and event participation through releasing game modes, increasing mission variety, and changing the first win of the day structure in the event pass. Finally, Eternals which were met with rather negative feedback in 2019 have been revised to be purchasable for blue essence and more accurately reflect the achievements a champion is known for.
More than ever, it seems that Riot is taking player feedback into account with the skin and event announcements today. But with one final tease, it seems that the much-desired announcer packs will also be coming some time during 2020.
In the end, there will be plenty of quality cosmetics and events for League of Legends players this year, but not everyone will be excited for each event the same way. For now, fans of the game can play ranked, Teamfight Tactics, or explore other Riot projects like Legends of Runeterra releasing in 2020.
League of Legends is available on PC.