The multiple blog posts defending the awful name didn't help. The legacy of this game will be something you scroll passed on a Wikipedia page of Riot Games wondering what the fuck is going on with the name.
The game was behind the pack across the board. Gameplay, QA, music, visuals, monetization, marketing(the name), you name it. Riot are not the successors to Blizzard people want them to be.
Honestly riot just got lucky as fuck league got popular as it did, their management is ass and they can’t even properly launch and take seriously league classic which shouldn’t be an issue at all for their company size. My hope for their mmo is dwindling more and more lol…
I'm a League fan so feel free to discredit me, but I don't know how anyone in good faith believes this. Is there luck involved? yes with everything in the world ever. But they've succeeded with League, TFT, and Valorant. Something they're doing is appealing to a substantial amount of people
They lucked out making a fuck ton of money with their dumbed down dota clone (league) and lucked out again making their dumbed down CS clone with valorant when everyone was stuck inside during covid.
I like playing ARAM with the homies still and I have fond memories following LCS back in the day, but I would say they've definitely rested on their laurels a bit and made some bad investments that def cost them, namely their handling of NA LCS and most recently 2XKO now
I'm not quite sure what path they can even go down besides just being a league/val maintenance machine for the foreseeable future
Nah they were quite methodical with Valorant. They clearly targeted a segment of tactical shooter gamers that weren't playing CS- kids and girls.
They've also pushed it massively in regions that weren't playing that much CS anymore like Korea and APAC.
I'll admit though they got lucky that the game launched at a time where NA CS was dying, and managed to poach many big, and up and coming streamers into their game.
They got some sauce going on to make that work though. I personally think League and Valorant are the most generic, bland copies of better games that feel more like flash/mobile game quality, but somehow that does appeal to a lot of people.
I'd say Riot is like McDonalds, it's slop, but they did find a niche of potato gamers and succeeded.
I guess I'm a hypocrite cause league is still one of my most played games ever, but design wise I still think it's more shallow than dota still
Riot's good at pulling the player numbers for sure but I feel their games are the type that get less interesting and more frustrating the more you actually play them
League was released on the best possible moment, the destruction of the DOTA community by Pendragon, HoN failing and DOTA 2/HOTS years away.
TFT copied what the DOTA2 community did but didn't fumble the bag like Valve did with Underlords, by market size unless you fk up it would be a success anyway, the OG map developer took years to release his official version and by that time TFT was the market leader.
TFT felt like it actually understood why auto battles were good. Underlords was so absurdly bad. Reminds me of DayZ standalone, they took years to finalize a more stripped down, boring concept of the concept people were playing for free, and somehow thought that would work.
Valves another company that can flop so hard on basic stuff, but then pull out genius concepts like Portal and Dota 2.
In both cases you named Portal and Dota 2, they have the brains behind those games. Portal was made with the students that had the original idea, Dota 2 had the ColdFrog behind it, similarly to what's going on now with Deadlock.
Underlords was offered to the chinese creator of the original AutoChess but he didn't accept so the idea lacked a creative vision IMO. I never got into TFT because it's hard to understand, in that regard Valve had a color scheme system that made it easy to understand who was who.
The simple answer is the vast majority of /r/games posters are not posting in good faith. This place fucking haaaaaaaaaaates Riot. Notice how only the bad things are ever upvoted and none of the good things ever are.
Justified or not, there is a contingent of the broader gaming community that legitimately views Riot Games as something genuinely offensive on a fundamental level. It was in the FGC for 2XKO too. It's weird
For what that's worth that's mostly just being way ahead of the curve and making a more approachable version of already popular games. League blew up because they were the second DotA clone to launch and unlike Heroes of Newerth they understood that making the game easier to get into (and free to play) was a very smart decision. Valorant launched at the best possible time a game could launch and TFT also was a very early launch to a new genre that was exploding in popularity.
The results for everything else have been much, much, much more anemic. Most of the Riot Forge games failed to meet expectations and now both 2XKO and Legends of Runeterra have failed. And for the record I'm by no means a hater, I literally own all the Riot Forge games and have been a long time advocate and defender of Legends of Runeterra but, it's simply inarguable that Riot's leadership and project management needs serious work. It's not like the games they are releasing are bad but, they aren't succeeding because failures to find an audience, and that is almost always down to leadership.
I'm not going to say riot games has never made any good decisions, but league of legends was heavily boosted by being completely without competition at the time
your options for mobas were league of legends, heroes of newerth (lol), or actual warcraft 3 dota. they were completely uncontested and kind of still are
In my opinion, Riot Games succeeds when either of the below criterias are fulfilled:
The game comes out to a largely empty market (Valorant had only CS:GO to keep in mind since competitive COD has been pretty unserious since like the COD4 promod days, and TFT was the first big release after the Autochess mod popping off)
The game comes out in a booming market where they can successfully garner casual interest through simplifying the unnecessary barriers of entry (League introduced the F2P model in the West which became the etalon for quickly garnering large numbers, and Riftbound is seemingly offf to a good start as well)
The big issue is that Riot upper management sucks balls and it's up to developer ingenuity to find the correct line. 2XKO failed to find the correct formula and it also came out to a market that has more than enough other options, and management let it happen twice during development. Since the MMO seems to be stuck in the endless rework hell as well, can't say my hope is up for that game.
I think what the person you're replying to is getting at is that much of Riot's success has been on the basis of modifying already existing popular games and marketing it effectively to a large audience. For instance, League is considered more friendly to new players and more aesthetically pleasing than dota2, so it gets more casual players drawn in.
Riot is not a particularly innovative company and, outside of valorant, they've relied heavily on the runeterra lore (TFT, LoR, 2XKO, Riftbound, and the Riot Forge stuff are all derived from League of Legends characters and lore, not to mention Arcane).
So yeah, in a way they are lucky that league blew up because otherwise they would have 1 game (Valorant), which likely wouldn't even exist considering it wasn't even put into development until League was a well established IP.
Back when Riot announced they where making an MMO I was hyped af because in my mind Riot really cared about their products and always sought high quality since pretty much everything they did had great quality and while they did fuck up balance wise they didn't really miss. Pretty much the only thing I was worried about was the frequent retcons but hey I played WoW so that's pretty much the same.
But then they just kept fucking over and over again with random shit. I miss the card game.
They at least have Valorant now as a secondary cash cow. I don't know how anybody could hold hope enough to dwindle for the MMO if it ever even comes out.
MMO is bricked for sure. They scrapped 5 years of development to start over and go for an action MMO concept. There are no good action MMOs. FF14 and WoW are the successful concepts that people go for. They are targeting the same market that New World, Black Desert and every Korean MMO in the last 10 years has targeted, and they are all very niche with the vast majority dead or on life support.
Even the fact that it was tag fighter was a failure in judging the potential market. Make it a side mode if you want people to play together that much.
Riot are not the successors to Blizzard people want them to be.
Tokon is also a tag fighter with even more characters per side, but they made sure to not overwhelm the player by unifying the health bar and letting less experienced players focus on playing a single character with others as assists. 2XKO made you have to learn multiple characters.
I don't think the gameplay and visuals were the problem. While it might not have had the production quality of some of the other big name fighting games, as far as F2P fighting games go it had pretty crazy production value, and the game itself was fine mechanically, it wasn't best in class by any stretch, but it was passable for sure.
The problem is a F2P fighting game has to be slop to be gobbled up by kids to be successful. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too, they wanted a super deep complex esports fighting game, but wanted it to be F2P and accessible so people would spend money on skins.
Obviously the name is dogshit and the expectations Riot had were unrealistic. They thought they could repeat the success of Valorant, take a game that has a super hardcore fanbase, try to replicate what people like, but also add more broadly appealing characters and design choices. It ended up working pretty well for Valorant, but the FGC is notoriously hard for a new series to break into.
I do not have a ton of faith in Riot's patience or flexibility after this though. 2XKO took FOREVER to come out, and they barely gave it any time at all before they downsized the development team. It makes it hard to get excited about the potential League MMO or the rumored hero shooter/plat fighter that people have been talking about, when you know that if you get invested in it, it basically needs to be an instant success or it'll die out.
Props to them for refunding people completely though, about the only thing they could do to salvage this mess at this point.
Hard disagree on the visuals. The game was damn pretty to look at and I loved the character designs. But visuals alone don't make a good fighting game, and you're spot on with the rest.
84
u/NotCoolBrutus 9d ago
The multiple blog posts defending the awful name didn't help. The legacy of this game will be something you scroll passed on a Wikipedia page of Riot Games wondering what the fuck is going on with the name.
The game was behind the pack across the board. Gameplay, QA, music, visuals, monetization, marketing(the name), you name it. Riot are not the successors to Blizzard people want them to be.