After a bunch of decidedly low-poly character models started leaking from League of Legends’s public test servers, Riot decided to pull the ripcord: League of Legends Classic is real, though when exactly it will harken back to is yet to be seen.
The reveal came in the form of a cheeky skit called “200 Years of Experience” where League of Legends executive producer Paul “Pabro” Bellezza is trapped in a Pepe Silvia nightmare trying to conceptualize the ideal era for the mode. “Is it season one? Is it season four,” he wonders. “Could it have been season two, when we started having jungle pathing? Could it be when we had Heart of Gold? It was a shell! Why was it named Heart of Gold?”
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He doesn’t clarify when the mode will be set, but the leaks suggest it could be a blend of things that changes over time—the video description states that a full reveal will come on July 11 during the MSI Finals. League of Legends has properly Ship of Theseus’d itself over the years, and a lot of questions come with an announcement like this.
Will the old set of currencies be used for unlocking characters? Will the now-defunct Twisted Treeline 3v3 map be returning? What about old rune pages and quintessences, buildcraft systems that have long been supplanted? We don’t know just yet, but if there’s the slightest chance I can play pre-rework Galio again, I for one am interested.
If you’re curious as to why anyone would want to play a version of League with fewer playable characters and more dated visuals—aside from nostalgia—it comes down to the fact that League of Legends has changed a lot. It used to be a bit more similar to its big brother Dota, with lots of consequential mana costs and powerful point-and-click spells.
The modern game moves faster with highly mobile mages, skillshots out the wazoo, and a scaling movespeed buff in spawn to get you back to the fight ASAP. The old game is simpler and sillier: just compare post-rework Sion’s guttural voice work to pre-rework Sion’s two-bit Arnold Schwarzenegger impression crying out to hear “the lamentations of noobs.”
Notably, this is not the first time a project like this has drawn eyes. A fanmade classic server for League, Chronoshift, was shut down after Riot got involved and assured the team behind it “the Chrono break [was] coming.” While that back-and-forth is mostly remembered via memes, it seems like interest in an old-school version of the venerable MOBA has not died down since, putting it in a class with MMOs like World of Warcraft and RuneScape. It’ll be interesting to see if this pans out the same way, or if MOBA nostalgia fades fast.
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