If you were to ask me who the best designed champion in League of Legends was right now, I would answer Warwick, post-rework. Warwick isn’t my favorite champion, I don’t play him regularly, but you don’t need to be enamored with something to appreciate it how well it’s made. I don’t use Apple products, but I still recognize how well designed their products are. Rather, I think that Warwick’s latest iteration is an example of a great solution to a lot of problems.
Before the rework, Warwick had a lot of problems. He was one of the original characters released with League and his design was showing its age. I can’t know all of the problems Riot’s team identified, but here’s some major problems I’ve identified with Warwick’s old design:
- Due to his healthy jungle clear, straightforward abilities, and low cost in the store, Warwick was the go-to jungler that new players were directed towards, both by other players and Riot themselves. This isn’t a problem in itself, but it is a problem when combined with the other issues in the list.
- Warwick’s abilities, aside from his ultimate, were unsatisfying to use. They felt like they had little impact on the game, no interesting decisions were to be made in their execution, and lacked any audio or visual feedback. Basically, he was boring to play.
- Warwick’s Blood Scent ability was confusing to understand for new players, as you could toggle it on or off, but new players wouldn’t understand the value in turning it off (it revealed to opponents that you were near if you had it on). Additionally, it was very easy to accidentally toggle it off in the heat of a fight and never realize you’d done so, because toggling it had no feedback.
- Warwick’s ultimate did felt impactful, but there was little counterplay to it, it was a simple point and click ability. Additionally, the vast majority of his power was in that one ability, so he felt useless in a fight without it.
- Finally, Warwick’s art and sound were out of date, but I won’t go into that here as this article is just about the gameplay design.
So the champion rework team had a lot of goals they wanted to hit with Warwick’s rework, and I think they knocked it out of the park.
Capturing the Feeling of a Predator
I’m a huge fan of evoking a fantasy in games, I think it’s a great way to orient a design and give guidance to a project. Additionally, it’s a great source of inspiration. Warwick’s fantasy is that he is an inescapable wolf-like monster that hunts down its prey. If you’re injured, he will smell your blood and your death becomes inevitable.
Every aspect of Warwick’s design reinforces this fantasy, not only for the Warwick player themselves but also for his opponents. His animations when he’s running towards his prey looks primal and dangerous. His Jaws of the Beast ability latches onto you. His Blood Hunt ability visually shows the Warwick player his incredible ability to smell the blood of enemies, and the graphic and sound effect enemy players get when they become wounded instills fear into them. Warwick is coming to get you. His Primal Howl puts enemies in literal fear of him, and his Infinite Duress is a leap that feels like a predator jumping straight at you.
All the animations, sounds, and gameplay come together amazingly well to evoke this fantasy of a dangerous predator. You don’t need to be told what Warwick’s deal is, just by playing him or seeing him in action, you get what Warwick is. What’s particularly impressive here is that the character feels satisfying to play, every ability feels impactful, and yet still has reasonable counterplay for opponents.
Designing For New Players and Experienced Players
The rework team knew that Warwick was a character that new players were going to be playing and learning how to jungle on, and his abilities were obviously designed with this in mind. While they do have a fair bit of text each (which is unfortunate, I guess he’s not perfect), each ability is quite intuitive in what it does. Two of the abilities, Jaws of the Beast and Primal Howl, both have an “extra” component to them, which I find interesting as that’s not really conducive to new players, but I think here we see that the Riot designers recognized that Warwick can’t be too simple, he needs some extra depth for players to discover and grow into. Both abilities do “just work” if you hit them without understanding them fully, which redeems them, and learning how they can be activated in other ways opens up new options for players.
One of the things that most impresses me about his new kit is Blood Hunt’s passive effect. New players that are in the jungle are tunnel-visioned on killing the jungle camps, and don’t watch the lanes. In fact, they likely have their camera locked to their champion so they couldn’t even look at the lanes if they wanted to. Blood Hunt’s passive effect tells them that one of the enemy laners is on low health and encourages them to try ganking, so the ability’s design encourages new players into learning the right behaviors to play the game. After playing Warwick in the jungle, new players will start to look for themselves for low health targets they can gank. It’s a subtle but powerful learning tool.
Warwick’s rework makes me wish that all the new champion Riot releases weren’t always set at the maximum store price, and sometimes designed for new players. I would like to see what they could do.
Imagine a marksman character that cost only 450 IP, whose passive ability is gaining attack damage with every minion they last-hit, teaching players to prioritize minion kills over fighting the enemy laners, as well as other mechanics that teach important aspects of being a marksman. What about a support character that is a pacifist and has mechanics to encourage you to never kill minions as a support? Or a top-lane bruiser who is a loner and is strongest while isolated, encouraging players to learn how to split-push? Riot’s current trajectory seems to be to try to instill these lessons into the existing current low cost champions when they rework them, but it seems to me there’s some lessons you’ll never be able to really hit right on the head with that method.
Wrapping It Up
So, what can we learn from this terrifying predator?
- Making a design focus on delivering a fantasy is a good way to “keep the ship on course”, guide and inspire design decisions. Delivering on a fantasy well is exciting to players all on its own.
- Design with new players in mind, especially if the design is going to a common part of the new player experience. Any opportunity to teach players lessons in how to play the game well, without feeling like you’re explicitly telling them what to do and holding their hand, is a win.
- Don’t get so tunnel-visioned on the design being simple for new players that it lacks depth for more experienced players. Any player should enjoy the character, and those new players need somewhere to grow into.