Gamasutra has featured a rather exhaustive interview with Riot Games director of system design, Tom Cadwell and community relations manager, Steve Mescon on their upcoming game, League of Legend: Clash of Fates. For the uninitiated, League of Legends is being developed by Riot Games that was founded by DoTa co developer, Steve 'Guinsoo' Feak and is designed to elevate the gameplay that was introduced in DoTA and rectify its flaws.
What mentality have you taken in developing this game? You're building on the legacy of Defense of the Ancients [which the team created a postmortem of for Gamasutra recently], its existing dynamic and fan base, but how are you rethinking it?
Tom Cadwell: We're trying to find out, "How do we keep the core experience of DOTA and enhance it, broadening it so more people can experience and enjoy it?"
There are a couple aspects to that. One is just removing the obvious pain points and trying to make it go better -- adding matchmaking so you can find a competitive match that's going to be against people in the same skill level as you.
We're improving the user interface... instead of using the Warcraft III interface, which wasn't really suitable for DOTA. It's really designed for a single character rather than multiple characters as with RTS controls. There are a lot of little enhancements like that. We're polishing a lot of the things the DOTA audience just lives with.
We also thought that adding a persistent gameplay element that allows you to progress over time would add a lot of value to the gameplay. It just makes it a lot more fun. We're trying to pick mechanics and characters that follow principles of simple but deep design.
Riot Games plans to do a lot of post launch content and features. They see it as a service rather than a single product. You can expect a lot of changes to the game after release just like DoTA.
That's definitely the direction PC games are going these days. Valve talks about it all the time, of course. It seems like in the last few years, it's become an increasingly feasible -- arguably even necessary -- route for PC developers to take.
SM: Interestingly enough, I think we're seeing a lot of similar models like this outside of the game industry as well. We're seeing a lot of products and services -- products that are really being offered now as a service.
For example, you see music services now where you can listen to music but you don't need to necessarily buy a song. A lot the same concepts are spilling over when you're talking about operating a game as a service. It's just becoming a point of familiarity with people.
TC: Yeah, I think you could talk about the economics of those sort of things, but what I really think is important is just that players like having games as a service. They like to have a game that's patched frequently. That's more fun. I think as a game developer, that's your first priority. If you can give players something that's more fun, you're going to be rewarded for that.
You can read the entire interview here
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