#game-balance

#game-balance

Over the holiday season, despite my best efforts to play more Hollow Knight: Silksong and Expedition 33, I felt the weird haunting pull of League of Legends again. There are so few five-player versus five-player competitive experiences with such a rich cast of characters that I've essentially grown up alongside. League of Legends is entering its seventeenth year in gaming and it looks like it has no intention of slowing down yet.

Let's jump straight into the most consequential change Embark is looking to make for launch: The flying Arc drones are too damn perceptive. While many people, including myself, felt that dealing with our robot overlords above Speranza was appropriately challenging, those damn drones were quick to find and harass enemy players. Embark is changing that. In the post the studio said:

Now and then, a patch adds something that makes you wonder how it got through testing. Most competitive game fans pore over patch notes, combing through every change to make sure their favorite fighting game or hero shooter is "fair" and skill-based. Well, Dragon Ball FighterZ got a last week, and even if you don't play Arc System Works' anime fighter, you should see this absolutely dirty new tech for one of its many Goku variants.

To help make that happen, the game's developers will soon release an expansion fully capitalizing on that TV series for the first time, and I got to spend a few hours playing that update to see if it's any fun. The important work is a lot less flashy: combat overhauls, bug fixes, balance updates, quality-of-life improvements, and technological tweaks-all of which have been added to the game over time. Ultimately, that little stuff adds up to be more impactful than the big stuff for players.

Opinions from the Commander Format Panel varied. Some believe Commander is more fun without them, others would like more time to see how the Commander Bracket system is adopted before doing anything here.