In my last post I mentioned a game called League of Legends. I talked about its exchange system, both in real money and in-game currency. You can unlock champions permanently with either in-game influence points or hard cash Riot points, the only things you can't buy with IP are character skins, which most of the time isn't too much of a concern.
What I didn't talk about was the game itself. Now, when I say this I'm not talking about the mechanics, although I'm sure I'll get there eventually. No, what I really mean is the narrative of the game, at least what there is of the story. Since the game is entirely about competitive play between teams, its kind of like expecting to get a great storyline out of online Starcraft games.
The story that is present in the game you have to get from the character bios and the lore section of the League of Legends website. It's all pretty simple, you have a world, a MYSTICAL world populated by fantastic beings (and also people and critters). This land has been the site of a long series of huge wars utilizing a kind of magic referred to as 'runes,' and while I am fully aware of what a rune is in most games and real world runes as records in Germanic languages. The Rune Wars apparently was leading to the end of the world as they knew it, and no one seemed to be fine. So, in order to come up with a system of settling conflict without destroying the world a new governing body was formed, the Institute of War that governs the League of Legends. The League is controlled by the summoners of each end of a conflict. The summoners, appropriately, summon champions that make up the combatants of the League. The two opposing sides then lead armies of lesser soldiers against one another until the opposing sides Nexus is destroyed.
I'm perfectly fine with all of this, the champions are people and things that have agreed to take part in the conflict for whatever reason, personal gain, a challenge, and in a few cases it seems against their will, like Cho'Gath and Kog'Maw, two beings from the Void, or if you're a Discworld reader we might as well go ahead and call it the Dungeon Dimensions.
Where my problems really kind of start is with the armies your characters lead. This is one of those things that if you don't read the website you won't know it, the individual soldiers are controlled by their own summoners. In fact, the lore seems to imply that this is how beginning summoners are trained and I suppose that makes sense.
So, this is where I land on it, how hard must it suck to be these guys and how hard do they suck at their jobs that they are literally cannon fodder with no strategy or skill. All they do is wander down their lanes and attack the first thing they come into contact with, but they seem to prefer their opposite numbers. Sure, if they find an enemy champion by him or herself they'll attack them, but once an enemy soldier attacks them, the aggro switches over to that attacker. Pressing this even further, we land on the idea that there are four kinds of soldiers, sword and board soldiers, ranged attackers with magic staves, a guy with a cannon and a relatively large load of hit points, and the super minions, the standard guys in, I kid you not, fantasy style mecha.
So, we have these guys who are controlling all of these things, maybe three or four full waves worth of summoners. On top of that, the cannon guys only spawn every other wave and the super minions only spawn after you destroy your opponents' inhibitor. There's summoners for all of these guys, a load of them, I'm sure. If we assume that more powerful soldiers are controlled by better summoners, then we end up with the idea that what these guys end up with is working their asses off, sucking at their jobs, and being rewarded with the ability to control a stronger unit. It's the most experienced guys that haven't quite gotten to the point where they get to control one of their team's five champions. They have no guarantee that they will ever get to play, they won't spawn unless you destroy the enemy inhibitor.
So, like I said, how hard must it really suck to be one of these summoners?
No comments:
Post a Comment