What I think makes League of Legends good. Part 1

Currently, League of Legends (LoL) is one of the games I play the most. It is a game in a category of games that they call MOBA and I like to call Hero Arena (HA) games. Basically, each game of this type has a set of heros (or champions) that are placed on teams. Each hero has some abilities that can typically be improved as a match progresses and the objective can be a few different things. The most popular objective, and the one used in LoL, is the destruction of the enemy base after the progressive destruction of a series of defensive structures. In a standard 5 vs. 5 game of LoL, there are 3 "lanes" each with 3 turrets defending an inhibitor (a building that prevents the enemy from spawning "super minions") and then 2 more turrets defending the main base building (called a nexus). Periodically, minions are spawned that follow a set path down the lanes towards the enemy base and it is the job of the heros (controlled by players) to influence the battle of the minions to cause the destruction of the enemy defensive structures.

There are a few things that attract me to the game including the accessibility of the game, the transparency of the developer, the colorful, stylized graphics, and the enjoyable voice acting. Today I want to write about the things I like about League of Legends in terms of game design, and particularly what is good about their decisions and how they generally make the game easier to get into for the new player. I'm going to do my best to focus on the decisions they made in designing League of Legends, and try my best to avoid talking too much about other games competing with League of Legends in the same genre. To some extent this is unavoidable because they are all based on DotA and some of the decisions are in direct contrast to the decisions their competitors have made.

Denying:

While on the subject of differences from the competition it is important to bring up the concept of denying. To discuss what it means to deny, we must first look at DotA, a game built on the Warcraft 3 engine. (Disclaimer: I have barely played any games of DotA because I didn't find it fun so I could be way off in my description here). In Warcraft 3, a Real-time Strategy Game, the player controls a group of units at a time and gives those units commands. Warcraft 3 made heavy use of heros in its basic gameplay and they functioned similarly to heros in LoL, except that the player also had the control of standard army units, and worker units. All units could be given the command to attack specific targets. As a convenience for when your own units or buildings got in the way, it was possible to order your units to destroy your own allied units. There was rarely a benefit to this practice, but it was allowed for the rare circumstances when pathing wouldn't work, or when you needed food that was being used by a weak unit to train a more powerful unit.

In Dota, a map was set up just like I described for League of Legends. The default behavior built in to Warcraft 3 was used for hero experience and gold, and that is that the hero that lands the killing blow on a unit gets gold for that kill, and every unit that dies in range of the hero grants some amount of experience to the hero, increasing its level and power. Gold is a powerful resource because it is what is required to purchase items for your hero that greatly increase his or her effectiveness in battle. It was quickly discovered that a player could attack the minions on his own side when they were almost dead to prevent the enemy heros from being able to get the gold from those kills. Additionally, gold is granted for killing towers, and once again, you could kill your own tower to prevent the enemy from getting gold for the kill.

Riot Games (the makers of LoL) decided that denying should not be a part of League of Legends. First they say that killing your own units just feels weird, and I have to agree with them on that. Second, I think that it is non-intuitive to a new player that he should kill his own units. As a new player coming to the game, you see the two waring factions locked in battle and so in order to help your team gain an advantage you kill your own troops? That's just silly. Riot made the decision to not allow the player to kill his own units, and instead increase the importance of harassing early in the game.

Harassing:

Early in the game, heros tend to distribute themselves to a couple of different lanes to gather gold from the enemy minions (as well as some from the neutral minions in the jungle, but I'll get to the jungle another time). In DotA, resources for using abilities were relatively scares, especially early in the game. In contrast, League of Legends is designed with slightly higher base resources, and a regeneration of resources that is high enough to be useful. Mana still can run out, but players are encouraged to attempt to deal damage to weaken their enemies to the point that they can either force them to retreat to heal, or maybe even kill their enemies, forcing them to wait a short time to respawn. The higher focus on harassing makes the game feel more like a battle and less like a game to see who can kill minions better than their enemy.

Punishment vs. Rewards:

This is perhaps the most important thing that I think Riot has done in their design of LoL. The entire design of the game seems to be of the mentality that players should be rewarded for playing the game and punishment should be kept to a minimum. One prime example can be seen in the way League of Legends deals with killed heros. When a hero kills another hero, the killing hero gains a good amount of gold and any assisting heros on the same team gain a smaller amount of gold as a reward for doing something good. The hero that has died is taken out of the fight for a short time, but has no equipment, experience or gold taken from him. Other games punish players for death much more harshly, by removing the things they have obtained. Harsh punishments can be depressing to a player, and even more so to a player that is new and has to deal with deaths perhaps a little more frequently than the more experienced players.

Free to Play:

League of Legends is a "free" game. That means that the game is free for anyone to download, install and play as much as they want, with one catch. That is that it is supported by micro-transactions. Each week, Riot sets 10 of the heros in the game to be free for anyone to use. This set of 10 heros changes from week to week. Each hero can be unlocked by playing the game for a certain amount of time, or by paying a small fee to the company to buy permanent access to a particular hero. Also, alternate looks for heros can be unlocked by similar small payments of approximately $4-$14. I'll probably talk more about this topic in a future post, but the important part for my current discussion is that it is easy for people to play the game since there is no cost upfront, which means that you can play with friends whenever you want. For me, gaming is much more fun when it becomes a social experience.

This post is getting kind of long so I'm going to stop here for now. Topics for next time: Persistant Rewards, Tutorials, Map Design and Learning Curve.