We travel to San Francisco to get a hands on look at Riot Games upcoming title "League of Legends".

You know that feeling when you play a new game and you're instantly hooked? Growing up it was games like Doom and Utopia: The Creation of a Nation that introduced me to such feelings. Later, games like EverQuest, Command and Conquer: Generals, Battlefield 1942 and WarCraft III gave me that same feeling. Something I noticed in 2008 however, is that, even though there were tons of great games coming out, many of which I enjoyed and spent a great deal of time playing, there weren't any that I found myself uncontrollably passionate about.

Last month, Riot Games had me out to San Francisco to check out League of Legends. I knew little about the game but anyone who models the game's entire concept around a Warcraft III mod has my attention. Of course, I was extremely skeptical, but after I sat down and played my first game, that old feeling washed over me. I was hooked. So much so, our two hour meeting turned into a six hour meeting, causing me to nearly miss my flight. I did however get an interview with one of the stars of the League of Legends team, Director of Systems Design, Tom Cadwell.

ZAM: Hey Tom, it's such a pleasure to have the opportunity to sit down and talk to you today about your latest project. How are things going over at Riot Games?

Tom Cadwell: Things are great!  We are really busy right now, but everyone's pumped.  We are in our friends and family beta period, and getting to play the game with our friends outside the company is causing contagious enthusiasm in the team.  Guys come in after playing, and have some idea they are really passionate about, and put it in.

ZAM: League of Legends is a stand alone product which has gameplay similar to, and is said to have gameplay that is far superior to DotA. Can you give us a crash course? What is League of Legends?

Tom: League of Legends is a PC game based upon games like DotA (the "MOBA" genre).  It is being created by a team of game industry professionals, DotA enthusiasts, and DotA community leaders, such as Steve "Pendragon" Mescon (owner of Dota-allstars.com) and Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, original author of DotA Allstars through version 6.0.

In MOBA games, you play a single character in an RTS-like control scheme, and participate in various team objectives (destroying defenses, killing NPCs) against another team.  You defeat other players, clear key objectives, and level up your character and gear him out.  The combat is faster-paced than an RTS, as it is focused on effective, timely and clever use of your character abilities in combat situations.  This gameplay has been very successful in a number of Warcraft 3 mods, most famously DotA, AoS, and Tides of Blood.

LoL builds upon this gameplay both by polishing the basic experience and giving it a unique, highly stylized and polished art style, as well as adding a bunch of major new features.  For example, we are adding multiplayer matchmaking, the summoner system (which is a persistent advancement system but with more depth than COD 4 or TF2 unlocks), and optimized controls and engine built specifically for this type of game.  We feel that DotA revealed an incredible new game genre, and we are trying to take this genre to the next level in as many ways as we can.

ZAM: We've been told that the LoL team is made up of quite a few industry veterans. Besides yourself, can you give us some names and former projects?

Tom: Most of the game team has worked in the industry in some capacity and the average Riot employee has worked on several PC or console titles, but here are a few examples:

• Steve Snow, our Lead Producer, worked on Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, and a bunch of other titles.
• Mark Franz, our Development Director, worked on Ultima Online, The Sims Online, and several other MMOs at EA.
• Ian Pieragostini, our Lead Client Engineer, was a lead on EA's Godfather, and was a lead at Microsoft's Racing Studio.
• Hokyo Lim, our Art Director, worked on Sly Cooper 1, 2 and 3.
• Scott Gelb, our Platform Technical Director, was the technical leader responsible for Perpetual's MMO platform, which was licensed by EA and BioWare.

ZAM: The game is an "Online, Session Based, Action, Role Playing Game". Can you tell us what that means in a nutshell?

Tom: That is a description of LoL's connection to the MOBA genre.  The game is online, but it is session-based like an RTS or FPS, not a persistent world like an MMO.  However, there are persistent elements - success in games allows you to advance over time.

As for the action and role playing elements specifically, those are key to the MOBA experience, and we will be bringing them out further in LoL.  We want our game to feel, at least with some Champions, a bit more actiony than other MOBA games.  And we want the RPG choices you make in leveling up characters to be as meaningful as we can while keeping things simple.

ZAM:   Riot Games President, Marc Merrill said "We hope to take competitive gaming to the next level by combining the best gameplay elements of games like World of Warcraft Battlegrounds with some of the really innovative gameplay that was created in Defense of the Ancients". Can you elaborate on how this is made possible in League of Legends?

Tom: The heated team-based PvP struggle inherent to both games will come through in LoL, but in terms of borrowing the superior elements from both, there are a few aspects to that.

First, we want to make a highly polished play experience.  DotA is a great game, but it lacks the polish level that many other great multiplayer games have.  That's really in the details - specific abilities feeling good, controls being ideal, the game giving you good feedback on what is going on.  DotA does these things well, but we think that by drawing inspiration and techniques from other great games, we can do it better.

Secondly, we like the basic gameplay in DotA of having a Champion, progressing in power, killing lots of NPCs, helping your allies achieve objectives, and sometimes fighting players.  We think that this basic gameplay could scale really well across other types of objectives - different map types with different goals other than the traditional DotA set.  We also think we could increase or decrease the PVP focus of the game in different map modes to make a compelling new experience.
 
ZAM: How many different characters do you estimate having at launch?

Tom: It really depends on how many end up being good enough - some need more time to work on than others, and we would rather ship a lower number of excellent Champions than a larger number of pretty good Champions.  It is not uncommon for us to replace some or all of a Champion's abilities after playing them for a while.  That being said, I would guess we will ship with a number between 30 and 60, with many more coming out after launch.

ZAM: While we're on the "how many" train, do you have an estimate of the number of different maps that will be available when the game goes live?

Tom: At launch, just a few - we intend to ship with several art variations of a 3-lane 6v6 map, and if all goes well we will ship some 1-lane and 2-lane maps intended for smaller team matchups.  After launch, we will make additional game modes which will look very different.  We are looking to various team-based RTS, FPS and MMORPG maps for inspiration.  For example, I think that Enfo's Team Defense is a good place to look for inspiration, and I also think that control point maps in general have a lot of possibilities.

ZAM: In the same vein, how easy will it be to create new balanced maps? From what I understand, unlike DotA, players will be exposed to new environments often.

Tom: It depends on how different the map is.  For art variations of the same layout and game mode, we can work pretty quickly.  However, we aren't going to make a ton of variations of one game mode because we don't think it's the best use of our effort.  Look at TF2 for example - there really aren't too many Valve maps for a particular game mode, and it works great.  If you take popular RTSs of any sort, players tend to play on a fairly narrow range of maps when given the choice - it's just what gamers prefer.  With this pattern in mind, we have decided to concentrate on making available a small selection of extremely polished maps in each game type.

The variety for gamers is going to come from the game modes.  2 Fort plays very differently from Gravel Pit and Arathi Basin plays very differently from Alterac Valley.  We'd rather give people a totally new game mode than a half dozen new variations of an existing game mode.  Getting these to be very polished takes a lot of iteration time.

ZAM: The first teaser trailer that was released back in 2008 looked great and in many ways, reminded me of Blizzard trailers/cutscenes. Will you use cutscenes similar to what was shown in game to help tell the story?

Tom: We want to do more of these sorts of cinematics in the future, but we are so focused on making the core gameplay awesome right now, and it's still a bit on the horizon for us. 

ZAM: All things considered, how much development time is involved with each new character? Can players expect additional characters that won't jeopardize balance to be added post launch?

Tom: About 60% of our content effort is allocated to new characters, with the rest going to maps, UI, and nuts and bolts gameplay refinement (new mouse cursors, usability tweaks, tutorials and all that sort of stuff you don't think too much about).  After launch, a higher proportion of our time will be spent on new characters and new maps, perhaps 70 or 75%. 

I think that we can add as many Champions as we want without hurting play balance if we are methodical and test new Champions thoroughly.

Because it is a team game and individual Champions tend to not be hard counters of each other, the sensitivity the game has to play balance issues is a lot lower than an RTS.  In an RTS, making a single unit too strong can wreck play balance for the entire game because that unit being a particular strength is key to the entire race working.  In League of Legends, an overpowered champion has to be a lot more broken to break the competitive environment because it's in a team matchup, and because it isn't intended to be a hard counter - we design for this sort of variety in the first place, and get a lot of leeway as a result.

In the long run though, too many Champions can make the game confusing.  This isn't really a balance problem, but is a big danger.  We aren't sure how we will solve this at this point, but one idea we have is to borrow elements from Magic the Gathering to solve this.  MTG uses a season system to keep the competitive environment fresh.  They rotate out content (and then revive it later sometimes, and of course, keep many of the core ideas and favorites).  This gives players the opportunity to adapt their strategies across different seasons of the game.  We'd love to hear ideas from our fans on this challenge if they have them!

ZAM: Last question! What have been some of the most challenging aspects about designing this game?

Tom: One thing that is always a challenge is trying to figure out how to make a game like LoL more accessible to a broader group of players without compromising the core gameplay that its hardest core fans desire.  We try to find the smart choices that make it better for both groups.  I have a ton of respect for the guys at Blizzard for consistently achieving this balance and then some.

ZAM: Thanks again for taking the time to sit down and talk with us about the game. Just for the record, I'm challenging you to a future StarCraft II match. You best be ready to bring it!

Tom: I'm really looking forward to trying SC2 out also.  Hopefully I can get in enough games before that to not embarrass myself…  I'm an old man now -- a Korean teenager beat me at Starcraft a few weeks ago and it was pretty brutal.

Thanks for taking the time to ask more about League of Legends, and I hope you and your readers enjoy it!

Andrew "Tamat" Beegle
Editor-in-Chief
ZAM.com