The Teardown Analysis of League of Legends

By Louis Chan

League of Legends (Leagues/LoL) is one of the MOBA games that has the biggest player community in the world today. It is a team-based strategy game where two teams of five summoners (players) each pick a champion to play, and there are various decisions and actions to take depending on the game's progress. Champions are selected based on their kit's features: a passive ability with no ranks, three active basic abilities with five ranks each, and an ultimate with three ranks, which can be divided into 4 categories that are survival (defense), damage (offense), utility, and control. Those features are critical for formulating strategies, knowing offense timing, and forming a team with certain play styles that are beneficial to lane battles or team battles.

In general, the goal of the game is to destroy the enemy's Nexus (base) first to win the game, but there are obstacles on the lane (path) that both teams have to clear to achieve, including enemy minions, champions, and defense structures. Securing kills, fighting team battles, destroying defense structures, and taking epic neutral monsters in the jungle that grant bonuses as time-limited buffs are beneficial to the snowballing of the winning team but can also help the losing team turn the tide.

The core experience that Leagues want to bring is the intense confrontation between players and teams. From the ban and pick of champions, clear paths through game and battle, the understanding of champions' mechanics and the play they can bring to the awareness of game progress, management of map resources, vision control, and team battles, tactics, and plans are required at any time, and all 10 players have to make decisions in every moment. That forms special experiences that make Leagues different from other MOBAs.

Fast-paced, Strategic, and Ever-changing.

Up to now, there are more than 160 champions for the player to select and play, and each has different abilities and features that support myriad playstyles in different lanes; moreover, with rich and varied resources on the map of Summoner's Rift, players can implement a variety of strategies to pave their way for victory.

Champion System

The only thing player can control in Leagues is the champion they selected. Thus, knowing and comprehending the champions' base stats, abilities with the optimized casting combinations under situations, suitable item purchase and the synergy among them are vital to win lane or team battles. The champions will be balanced out by the proportion of them, which means, two of them will be the main modules with a slight amount of the third module involved in abilities, which formed the properties of champions.

During gameplay, scaling in lanes in early games is important which includes earning experience and gold, which are used for leveling up to unlock or upgrade abilities and purchasing items. However, those can only benefit the champion to a certain extent, the strength of the champion is mostly from the patch adjustment, understanding of ability mechanics, and the proficiency of the champions.

Combat System

It is for the game among summoners with the proficiency of champions selected, understanding of the game, including systems, time periods (progress), and familiarity with tactics and team formation, which affect the combat in game to a large extent.

The cornerstone of everything is the active champions' abilities, which are divided into three main categories: directional, target, and AOE (Area of Effect)/Location, which all provides different mutual gameplay experience, such as directional abilities that sometimes are difficult to dodge but with an obvious ballistic or cast animation to notify the opponents which provide a short period of time for them to react, the stake of this kind of abilities is normally high, huge cost but huge pay back if hit; target abilities normally are boosting teammates, have slighter on-hit effects, or with basic abilities that is difficult to manipulate to balance out the easiness of hitting; AOE/Location abilities are strong and able to deal damage effectively against enemy team, the cast time and cool down is longer than other abilities, and the range and damage normally balance out each other, that is saying, the larger the range, the less damage or slower damage rate; the smaller the range, the higher damage and damage rate. Also, there is a higher cost of casting correspond to the power of the abilities, no matter that is in time, cool down, health, or mana/energy.

Game Loop

The game loop of leagues is that as a summoner, the player will pick their champions and 5 of them will form a team. At that moment, strategy should be formed with consideration of the champions' attributes from their abilities. One round of game is divided into three main time period: early, middle, and late game, and the things player should do is different in each period, such as scale from lane minions and kills/assists, ganking and counter ganking, or monsters in the jungle in early games, have team battles surrounding map resources with reasonable division of lane which is beneficial to the team in the middle game, and strategic operation based on epic map resource, turrets, position of both team, minions, etc. in late game, and vision is an important part of strategy throughout the whole game. The main reasons that Leagues is not tiresome are: the gameplay experience above is different from game to game based on the selected champions' features, some of them are weak in early games but able to scale, some of them are robust in early and middle game; each lane has a completely different gameplay experience with corresponding responsibilities, and even the same champion plays in different lane has different experience not mentioning over 160 champions for the player to pick. Therefore, a team taking advantage of their champions' strong period and forming strategies based on that are the key to victory.

Summoner

Apart from the great gameplay experience from the battles that happen in the Rift, players also have an incentive to keep playing Leagues due to the plentiful featured game modes, aesthetic champion skins, well-designed reward systems that increased variety in collections, player dynamics, and a more personalized experience, such as Eternals, Banners, Tokens, Titles, Icons, etc. to increase the attractiveness of the game.

End Notes

The prospects of MOBA game

As the public is getting more familiar with MOBA games, with the vast existing competitors, it is not difficult to tell that the novelty is saturating its market. To save a game from dying, breakthroughs are necessary, and League of Legends has always been doing well on this thanks to the Riot Games' values and their passionate developers.

With the season update (per year) with various patches updates about champions, skins, activities, challenges, game modes, items, runes, map resources, etc. during the season, and the unceasing of new champions that bring new background lore and gameplay into the game has kept the in-game balance changing, and players need to find the most suitable or even optimized strategies and play style to secure victory. Apart from the in-game experience, the updates of game aesthetics, player HUD and UI also improve the in-and-out game experience. Both specific and comprehensive updates bring freshness to the game. Also, the music, MV, animation, well-arranged e-sports competitions, and the latest series Arcane are the best promotion of the game to keep it active in the public eye.

In conclusion, League of Legends can still be a popular MOBA game for over 10 years because of the efforts Riot Games put into it to improve the design of the game with the times by constantly updating game contents, operations, and branded products as promotions because

what the players need today is diversified, not just a wonderful in-game experience, but a masterpiece that can tug their heartstrings.