Hey, how did you get here? Mordekaiser ReforgedĪt the beginning of development, we came up with a prototype of Mordekaiser’s death realm. We did end up paying homage to his old ultimate by giving the new Mordekaiser a ghost crown when he steals the stats of another player during the 1v1 battle that happens during his new ultimate - in the death dimension.įun Fact: If you play our All For One mode and pick Mordekaiser, when you ult each other, you’ll all end up in the same realm. And when you see a dude with a huge mace, you expect him to hit people with that mace. This doesn’t really match the fantasy of an undead armor knight king who’s trying to populate his undead kingdom. His earlier gameplay was heavily rooted in spell casting where the clone does most of the work. But we decided not to, in part because it just didn’t feel true to who Mordekaiser was supposed to be.
There was a time during Mordekaiser’s update where we were considering bringing the ghost clone from his ultimate ability back. This would be a huge burden on all future champion development. But what about other champions who aren’t built to interact with multiple versions of themselves? This may seem small, but multiply that across every champion in the game and you end up with widespread issues that quickly get out of hand.Įvery champion after Mordekaiser would have to be adjusted so they could functionally turn into a clone.
Shaco, for example, is designed to have a clone - so his entire kit understands what happens when there are multiple versions of him. But what if Mordekaiser used his ultimate on a champion that wasn’t supposed to have a clone? The server would load extra content when a player started a game with Mordekaiser so it would be able to make a copy of other champions. There were also some strange loading issues causing Mordekaiser bugs. So when Mordekaiser would cast his ultimate on Jhin, he'd capture Jhin’s current state, which meant the Jhin clone would get stuck casting his empowered fourth shot for every auto attack. The problem here was that Mordekaiser would capture the enemy at a distinct moment in time. He’s designed with a four-shot auto attack, and his passive guarantees that his fourth shot critically strikes. These abilities often happen in the background of the game - they usually don’t need to be activated, but they shape the way the champion interacts with other players or the environment.Ī good example is Jhin. Passive AggressiveĪ major set of issues came from champion passives. Let’s take a look at two examples of in-game content that Mordekaiser’s old abilities struggled to handle. Just bug-fixing wouldn’t accomplish our main goal - to remove Mordekaiser-related production costs for all champions, past and future.īecause we wanted to address how Mordekaiser interacts with other champions in the game, we had to examine why his abilities were causing those infamous bugs. While planning out the Mordekaiser rework, we knew we’d have to redesign him at his core. This ability caused strange bugs and all kinds of problems across the board, because the game isn’t really set up to properly capture and replicate other characters.ĭo you think apartments charge pet rents for dragons? One particularly popular Mordekaiser trick was casting his ultimate on the dragon and rampaging down the middle lane with a dragon for a teammate. Mordekaiser’s original ultimate involved marking an enemy and granting a controllable clone if the enemy died while marked. Mordekaiser’s ultimate ability teleports him and one chosen enemy into a new dimension. We’ll take a look at some of the problems with Mordekaiser’s old ultimate ability and how we dove into dimensions to create Mordekaiser’s new ultimate - the Realm of Death. In this article, I’ll describe the tech that went into reworking the League champion Mordekaiser. Although my work is typically focused on how we build out a new champion, it also means revamping older systems and smashing tech debt along the way to help our engine evolve and allow us to keep creating new exciting experiences for players. I help create the systems that unlock new capabilities for champions in League. Hi, my name is Joshua Parker, and I’m an engineer on our Champions team.