Hey Redditors and future brawlers!

We’re some of the dev team members that brought you League’s most recent game mode, Brawl! With Brawl right around the corner we wanted to say hi and answer any burning questions you’re looking to ask us.

This AMA will run from 10am-12pm PT, but a few Rioters will likely stick around to keep answering questions.Rioters joining the AMA will include:

Riot_Riru (Community Manager) | Riot_Cadmus (Modes Lead) | RiotSirhaian (VFX Artist) | RiotDerkese (Gameplay Engineer) | RiotPhlox (Design Lead) | RiotAzuBK (Design Lead) | RiotDucke (QA Lead) | RiotPoise (Environment Artist) | Riot_fogcloud (Software Engineer) | RiotZenith (QA Engineer)

Let’s kick it off!

EDIT: We're about to wrap up, but some Rioters will stay behind to answer some more questions throughout the day so keep em coming. Thanks for all the great questions and see you in Brawl!

Hi :3
I hope your day is going well! :D

Personally, I really like playing Malzahar in there. Being able to E/W the minion wave and see them vanish one by one, while also having a powerful suppress makes him really good in Brawl in my opinion. :D

Yes! We removed a lot of the extra information/knowledge necessary to start playing League such as ganking, objectives or structures and streamlined the experience. It's also quick hop-in/hop-out game, much quicker than SR, on a smaller map, and with lower stakes.

Aww thank you <3 <3

We thought of doing Bandle City very early on, almost from the get-go. We wanted minions to go into portals, and Bandle City is known for their portals. Plus, we'd never made any Bandle City maps before, so it felt like a great opportunity to finally explore that space! To be more accurate however, this one is less Bandle City and more an exploration of the Bandle Woods (which is the name of the map!).

It's like ARAM but faster, with more fighting, and without structures!

I've personally been having a lot of fun in our playtests, so hopefully you guys will too once it's out! But only time will tell. :D Make sure to give it a try when it's on PBE!

Ooh you've already caught on many of the little details we've added! Good eye! :D

In this case, we just felt like they'd be perfect shopkeepers: beloved Yordle characters that we had models and animations for from TFT! I'm glad you like the little sleeping Yuumi I've added next to Norra. <3

Our environment artist (RiotPoise) then started populating their individual shops, and realized they would likely be friendly, non-competing shopkeepers who would buy at each others stores, hence the book in Kabuko's stall, and the slice of pie in Norra's shop. :)

I also do not like hot dogs either, sorry (RiotDerkese goes first :3)

It's one of my favorites too!! I really hope we get to explore more of Bandle City and Yordles in general, as I personally feel like they're often under-represented. But only time will tell!

The main difference in this case is that you do not have turrets protecting you, and there are side lanes that can be used by assassins to get to you. You could technically freeze the minion wave as ASol, but the other team has tools to take you down if you do not pay attention (or rather, you have less tools to protect yourself). The only turrets in this mode protect your spawn point, and that's it.

Some of my favorite things! The portals, I think they're neat! They show some of our different maps, showing that the minions that survive do not end their journey here. :D

I also really like sleeping Yuumi, she's just so cute. Gameplay-wise, I really like that it's lower stakes and less stressful. I also REALLY like the music. It's so relaxing!

Now for my least favorite things: playing against my colleagues, cause they're all too good. >:D

More seriously though, I'm obviously biased but I can't really think of many negatives. As with all projects, I just wish we had more time to polish and improve on it. :)

My personal favorite is Clannad, especially After Story! I also really liked Code Geass. :D

I haven't watched anime in a little while, but I should really get back into it!

I can answer a couple!

7) The recall is faster, only 4 seconds here. It also has unique particles. :)

9) Cappa Juice is available, yes. We need our hats!!

Camps work a little differently in Brawl. Blue and Red buffs still provide a buff to the killer, although stronger. When a player kills a camp however, they will gain a large amount of Gold, distributed amongst members of its team if they are close-by. Camps in Brawl are an alternative way to accumulate Gold and snowball the game.

I am the biggest hater of death note, it is true. Lowkey flip flappers or houseki no kuni tho

:D

The side camps are very powerful in terms of gold/xp value, so playing defensively is typically a losing play in our tests so far. We've had a lot of lower skill tests, and also had the Game Analysis Team do some focused testing, and in both the games were typically aggressive and bloody, even if individual players are more risk-averse. More optimized play typically resulted in shorter games with more decisive skirmishing around the edges of the map. I do think there are some comps that lend themselves to stalling, and if we see that emerge as a very common playstyle I expect we'll want to take action.

I don't have an answer for the champion-specific buffs/nerfs visibility, sorry.

We designed the mode to be closer to Summoner's Rift gameplay than ARAM (being able to recall and heal makes a huge difference), so we expect fewer extreme balance outliers. We do plan to balance similarly to ARAM, and we're considering which champions are clearly powerful enough to pre-emptively balance.

pog

K'sante could permakill someone by ulting them off the map at one point.

We went for typical yordle magic (golden gloopy magic) for the Order side vs Lulu-type magic (pink faerie magic) for the Chaos side. But some Veigar flavor would have been really nice, I agree!

Aww yes, I had a lovely birthday surrounded by friends! Thank you so much! :D

(They just demolished me at Top Golf but that's okay i still love 'em <3)

The strategic goal of maximizing ear pain is one we hadn't considered for the mode, but I do like the idea of scattering intermittent pipe sounds around for targeting that value.

The initial design goal is best spoken to by /u/AzuBK, but generally it was to target a fast, lower-stress mode that can afford large skill differences while still letting you pick your champion

hi!

And you can pick your champion!

Gold and XP are greatly accelerated, and some late-game champions (e.g. stackers) will have manual tweaks so they fit the pace of the mode. We've found late-game champions effective, but if they end up being weak we'll buff them.

No, we felt the format and new map were the main draw and wanted to focus on that. We talked about those early on, but didn't feel like this was the right place, especially given one of the goals of helping new players have a safer, more fun place to learn.

Gold and XP are greatly accelerated, and some late-game champions (e.g. stackers) will have manual tweaks so they fit the pace of the mode. We've found late-game champions effective, but if they end up being weak we'll buff them.

To add to Sirhaian's answer with some more nitty-gritty design...

It's critical that new players can understand why learning the game is worthwhile and experience a sample of that first-hand. ARAM actually does a pretty good job on both of these, but the inability to pick a champion undermines new players' ability to find their fave and have a familiar foundation going into each game. We believe that an ARAM-adjacent mode like this with free champion pick, stronger acceleration (you WILL get to play a strong version of your champ) and a lower-stakes vibe can be more successful for new players.

Jungle camps used to have 0 patience. You'd start attacking them and they would freak out and go back to their starting position near instantly. :)

Another one was that Chaos siege minions specifically at one point would just arrive at the portal and just... stand there. They wouldn't jump in the portals, they'd just stay there and wait for someone to kill them.

We were optimizing for getting into games fast and players being able to pick what they want which ended up leaning toward quickplay queue structure and thus no bans. If 20% of your Brawl gametime is in lobby it's probably a bit tiring to play the mode, for example.

That being said, I think there's some real opportunity longterm for figuring out a way to give people a ban or something like it. That'd be a sweet exploration space for the future but would have to really figure out how to balance it against impact on queue times and player desire for the feature.

To answer the second question, I think that a mode where you start at full build could work, but would need a lot more design work to make it interesting throughout. Scaling up from weak to strong is a core part of League's gameplay fantasy and results in different combat outcomes over the course of the game (fighting someone at levels 4, 8, and 16 will have dramatically different texture and outcomes). The pitch for Brawl was closer to "the teamfight and skirmish action of Summoner's Rift, without the macro," so we opted to keep all of that power growth in for this mode.

It's not off the table, but we would need a really good pitch for a mode that absolutely has to be big. Making bigger maps at similar quality is going to be more expensive and take time, and we'd typically prefer to focus on using our resources to deliver more new modes instead.

A Teemoshroom could shroom all the shrooms once a Teemoshroom shrooms a shroom.

We'll be doing a bit of proactive balance around pulling down high power champs (like best in class make the mode unfun types) and making sure that characters with mechanics like stack gathering or lategame scaling still feel good and functional in the mode. After that, we'll be targeting adjustments to keep the mode fun for everyone.

Same general approach for items and runes, there are just a lot of pieces of content tuned for a different combat style/cadence and different gametime than Brawl, so we need to do our due diligence there. I'm sure we won't catch everything, but we'll be giving a good stab at it and you can expect more changes post-release.

A fair amount, way back in the day. Was definitely my favorite part of that game.

We approached this one from a couple different directions at once, initially. When pitching it, I was thinking about things like "What needs are unfulfilled for new players learning the game?" "What is league's equivalent of Team Deathmatch (from FPS games)?" "Is there a way to make pick-ARAM a worthwhile mode?" These coalesced into the specific pitch that resulted in Brawl.

We'll be doing a bit of proactive balance around pulling down high power champs (like best in class make the mode unfun types) and making sure that characters with mechanics like stack gathering or lategame scaling still feel good and functional in the mode. After that, we'll be targeting adjustments to keep the mode fun for everyone.

Same general approach for items and runes, there are just a lot of pieces of content tuned for a different combat style/cadence and different gametime than Brawl, so we need to do our due diligence there. I'm sure we won't catch everything, but we'll be giving a good stab at it and you can expect more changes post-release.

Less complex, especially because of the camera angle and their size. But similar technique, yes. They have 4 random maps that they can show (randomized per client). :)

And thanks for trying them out! <3

Big fan of Baccano! and Samurai Champloo. I'm also contractually obligated to state that u/Riot_Cadmus is wrong and FMA '03 is better.

I remember playing a little bit ages ago, I liked that the camera was different from League. :D

But I never went past a dozen hours and stuck with League in the end.

It's okay to be wrong, u/AzuBK :D

Yes!

We briefly tested 4v4 but it was clearly a downgrade. Reducing the number of players made the game more methodical and strategic, which was an anti-goal for this specific mode.

Yes, we made sure that champion mastery is enabled in this mode!

Sona is one of the champions we're considering preemptive balance on. We're also quite sure we won't get everything correct on release, but we're also confident that the mode is already fun and we can improve it with further changes. Please look forward to it :)

Yeah K'sante teleported back to where he started after like 10s, the enemy was left to rot. No idea why lmao

Totally possible! We'll be watching closely and learning the kinds of things we might need. No bans was less of an explicit desire, but something we accepted to hit other goals and get it out to y'all.

As for champ balance - goal is definitely to prune down topend champions so it doesn't feel like there's some true menace that destroys the mode.

TURBO QUESTION TIME:

1. We'll be tackling scaling runes/items by speeding them up like other modes where necessary. Same with items that are way better in fast teamfight fiestas.

2. We tried a few different team sizes, but since it was Thunderdome we fast fast failed them to find what was most fun. 5 Players keeps things from being too chaotic on a small map, 4 wasn't fun when we tested it but maybe with a smaller map it could've been sick.

3. No bans right now, we wanted to optimize heavily for fast queues and being able to pick what you want. There's a world where we could add bans into quickplay style queues or similar, but nothing right now.

4. We have some summoner haste, but might want more... 👀 as for snowball we didn't think Melees needed the help as much on the mode with the way the map is designed. Also it helps stand a bit further from ARAM so that each can find its own audience.

5. Artists are probs better to answer this, but generally it was a fun thematic that fit the mode that we spiked out for Thunderdome, and then we wanted to ship it quick to y'all!

6. Why should water always be in the same place on a map for Qiyana? Gameplay wise it's interesting if she has to adapt to the map she's on. It also heavily restricts how we do map design if we always need water in the middle of every map for her.

7. Yep! Baron recall speeds with a snazzy new VFX from Sirhaian

8. We explored a bunch of different versions of the waves (and honestly would love to explore a bunch more), but for this launch we're leaning super simple on the ruleset. I could see waves generally getting a little more interesting in the future if that would suit the mode

Yeah K'sante teleported back to where he started after like 10s, the enemy was left to rot. No idea why lmao