Riot Games is rebooting the League of Legends lore

The narrative team at Riot Games is rebooting some of the League of Legends lore as part of a continued revamp of the game's core features including champions, splash art, skins and maps.

A new blog post from Riot's Tommy Gnox looks at the company's plans to cultivate the League of Legends backstory based on early concepts originally used to "justify" the gameplay — ideas like an Institute of War, Fields of Justice, and so on.

According to Gnox, some of these early narrative choices "fostered creative stagnation" and limited how the game's characters and lore could grow. As a result the team has experimented with storytelling by fostering the story through the recent Freljord event and Champion biographies.

However, the team aims to push story further "through various mediums." According to Gnox, the narrative team will begin creating regular development blogs discussing how story will continue to evolve in the game. This includes a push to ensure consistency in champion identities through backstories, gameplay and cinematics.

"Does this mean older story efforts like the Journal of Justice and League Judgments are meaningless?" writes Gnox. "Of course not. In the same way that we can go back and enjoy old books, shows, films, art, and comics that have been superseded by more recent interpretations of the same material, League's original lore remains a cherished part of its history. From comic books to classic literature, exploration of the same creative space in vastly different ways is a natural part of storytelling."