League of Legends: Riot reveal preseason gameplay direction

Today Riot Games revealed their plans for League of Legends in 2020 with a preseason gameplay direction update. We’ve taken a look at their decisions and summarized what they could mean for the future of the game.

Riot have set out their gameplay objectives for season 10 with the release of their Preseason Gameplay Goals. With the ten year anniversary of League of Legends on the horizon the team at Riot are eager to update the game and continue its success and popularity for years to come.

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More information will be available on October 15th, but for right now the dev team have handed the player base a quick overlook of the upcoming modifications to Summoner’s Rift that we can expect will be added in preseason. Nothing is set in stone, but the overlying strategy for the preseason update is to make each League of Legends game more unique with added variety throughout the map, as well as more focus on micro and proving one’s mastery of a role/champion.

Here’s a summary of the key points and what they might mean for our League of Legends experience heading into 2020:

"This preseason, we want to add new layers of depth to the map itself to evolve it into more than a static backdrop in your games."

Rather than update a specific role, group of champions, runes, or items, this preseason Riot will be aiming to develop Summoner’s Rift from a boring placeholder for the champions/monsters to exist on to a living world for your character to exist within. The latest SR updates, elemental dragons and jungle plants, went some way to diversifying the monotony of League of Legends’ most popular battlefield, but we can assume preseason 2020 will go one step further and make Summoner’s Rift even more engaging.

"Variety: The map should create more memorable moments via different environments you don’t see every game. Elemental Dragons already offer this very lightly, but we want to go further and in a way that’s fair for both teams."

The first bullet point, Variety, suggests that Riot are using elemental dragons as their base for further improvements to Summoner’s Rift and want any future additions to go further in terms of impacting the map state from game to game. While the post doesn’t go into detail, there are plenty of suggestions from the community already as to what this point may entail for the future of our favourite map.

All that can be said for sure is, if you enjoy RNG in your games, then you’ll enjoy the 2020 season. Creating variety in League of Legends more often than not depends on randomly generated monsters/terrain/buffs, and we can expect at least one of those options to show their face in November’s preseason patch.

All in all, variety is the right step in avoiding stale gameplay and these changes, albeit vague so far, sound very exciting and are something to look forward to for the playerbase over the next month.

"Mastery: The map should offer more details to play around in both the baseline experience and the not-every-game circumstances we’re creating. Much of SR’s mastery is currently macro-oriented (eg. rotations, objective trading), and we want terrain to support more opportunity for in-combat playmaking."

One thing we can all agree on is that season 9 has proven to be the most macro-oriented year in League of Legends history. Rather than snowballing your lead through kills and dominating your lane opponent, this year you’ve had to adapt your play style and focus on taking tower plates, rotating through the map, and grouping with your team to take down major objectives for gold.

While this was a step in the right direction in terms of improving League’s 5v5-focused gameplay, it left very little opportunity for individuals to push their lead in a 1v1 without the aid of their team-mates. Mastery looks to change that in preseason 2020 with more rewards for micro prowess, while still maintaining the fundamental teamplay roots that were built in 2019.

"The changes to SR are the main focus of this preseason, but you can expect a wide pass of other small improvements to the game’s systems. These will include support items, lethality items, improved top lane influence, jungle pathing improvements, improved dragon buffs, and keystone improvements."

On top of the first two major gameplay changes, the dev team have teased a number of other important changes heading to the game before the end of the year, most notably improvements to top lane. After another year of being left on an island with little impact on the map, top laners can now rejoice as Riot have answered their prayers and will be looking to improve the role in 2020, among a number of other changes.

These preseason changes will head onto the Rift in November with Patch 9.23, with more information about the changes being revealed on October 15th. With a month-long wait before we get to experience preseason first-hand, there’ll undoubtedly be a tonne of speculation on what these changes could include in the run-in to November’s big patch!

What would you like to see from Riot in preseason 2020? What role do you think needs the most help? Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter!