Description

League of Legends (LoL) is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) video game developed and published by Riot Games. The game contains many game modes, maps, the team size match-up can be 1-versus-1 to 5-versus-5, very customizable to fit your favor, number of friends. Every player can choose one champion from the ever-expanding roster of LoL champions to play in each match, each with unique appearance and playstyle. The game is available on PCs.

Link to game’s website: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/

Link to game play demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lcwPhtvOj0

Lens #9: The lens of Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics:

• Team-based, customizable team size MOBA game (the most common is 5-versus-5) with various game modes (Blind, Draft, Rank, One for All, ARAM, URF).
• Extensive champions, item choices with unique skills, effects in the game.
• Various character interactions, counters, strategies available for players to discover, master, have fun with teammates.

Aesthetics:

• The main aesthetics components are character skins concept art, map art, in-game character art.
• The concept art of character skins has expressions, details of than in-game character art, but have the same human-based, clean, tidy, colorful style of art.
• In-game characters is designed beautifully based on concept arts, but simpler and comes with beautiful unique ability animation, appearance based on skins.
• Character skins has various theme, comes with wide range of colors, patterns, which is very visually appealing.
• The game includes some fantastic famous music aesthetics created by Riots Games, also published as music video.

Story:

• Riots have a story behind all characters and even a map of Runeterra (LoL world map) so all characters have relations with each other tightly.
• They bring all characters from different regions to compete in this arena as a team.
• They bring their characters beyond of their original story to make music video or bring their original story to a film series to advertise LoL beautiful world, characters, skins.

Technology:

• LoL have a very low hardware minimum requirements to make the game accessible to a wide range of audience.

Lens #1: The Lens of Emotion

• Leagues of Legends makes me feel very excited when waiting for game searching, very happy, cheerful, amusing and addictive to the gameplay, animation, game flow, stressful when it is a close game. But this only happens in the ideal case.
• There are so many cases when you face much stronger players or your team plays too bad, blames allies, trolls, abandons the games. This makes a very frustrated, disappointed emotion for other players.
• Emotion is better when I play with friends, forming a full team, we can communicate better, encourage each other when losing, share the happiness when winning a close game.

Lens #4: The Lens of Surprise

• Players/Teams can surprise each other by strategically setting up to kill enemies. This can happen because a player cannot have vision of the whole map, and enemies can appear suddenly from bushes, walls, lanes and with their skills.

• The game supports player to make surprise like these with such map design and they also continue to add more map and character interactions.
• The player is sometimes surprised with a new game mode where everything is different, this is also partly based on player’s idea/suggestion.
• But sometimes, surprise comes from bugs, strange interactions in the game, which is not intended. Links of YouTube channel that keeps revealing LoL bugs after every update: https://www.youtube.com/c/Vandiril

Lens #32: The Lens of Goals

• The optimal goal of this game for every team is to destroy enemy Nexus. But of course, enemy team will try to defend it.

• These results in many small goals/ big goals that your team must achieve before winning the game. List of goals includes getting gold by killing minions, enemies, destroy turrets, inhibitors, eating important objectives around the map. All of these are to help to make you stronger to kill enemy team and destroy the Nexus.
• There is a good balance between short- and long-term goals throughout the game so sometimes the game ends so early but sometimes very late. And this all depends on the decision of players (character choices, playstyles, strategies). I think the goals of this game is very concise, balanced, entertaining for all players.

Lens #33: The Lens of Rules

• For main mode of games, there are so many basic rules like: you will be hit by the enemy turret if you attack enemy inside turret range, … These small rules make the game more interesting.
• Riots Games is also adding more rules for players with every new character, map objective introduced, which keeps players’ attention towards the game.
• As mentioned above, the game also has many other game modes, where some rules are changed. This is introduced to cater for all players’ favors.
• All the rules in the game is prone to change, to keep it interesting for all players. But for new players, these systems of rules take so much time to familiarize with them.

Lens #37: The Lens of Fairness

• Theoretically, every team has the same chance of winning because of the same rosters of champions and number of members. However, there might be some factors affecting this.
• Players from higher rank comes to lower rank (which is called smuff in LoL) to dominate other players. This is due to attitude of players.
• Players takes advantage of tools, bugs and too strong characters in the game to win the game easier.
• LoL tries to fix these with their frequent patches to fix bugs and balance characters in games. However, the fairness between 2 patches is still not guaranteed. But it is good news that Riots Games is still attempted to ensure the fairness of the game.

Conclusion

Although the game still has many bugs, problems, Riots Games still listening to players’ feedback, developing and improving the game. League of Legends has been and will be a successful MOBA game with its player community spread around the world.