Riot Games has confirmed Viktor is getting a new skin in League of Legends, which will turn the champion back into his former design.
The mage received a huge visual and gameplay update last December to more closely match the character from Netflix’s Arcane series.
The Viktor LoL VGU offered some great, quality-of-life gameplay changes like his ultimate, Arcane Storm, increasing in size after taking down opponents.
However, the new visual direction was disliked and heavily criticised by a lot of Viktor mains.
The initial PBE update received no upvotes and 2,000 comments on Reddit and members of the r/viktormains subreddit even petitioned for Riot Games to cancel the visual rework.
Riot did make some additional touch-ups to Viktor’s reworked skins before the changes went live but many were still discontent.
Riot is well accustomed to controversy surrounding new League of Legends skins announcements.
There has been a mixed reception to the expensive skin that will come with legendary esports pro Uzi being inducted into the Hall of Legends.
However, Riot said they take feedback in the most recent dev blog and confirmed the new throwback Viktor skin will release sometime later in 2025.
However, no other details were mentioned, including how much the skin will cost.
After the news leaked earlier in the day, many questioned if this Viktor skin would retain his previous running animation.
And another big question is whether the pre-work Viktor skin will have his old, mechanical voice lines return.
Riot’s Head of League Studio Andrei ‘Meddler’ van Roon then confirmed on Reddit that the old voice lines will return.
One Redditor wondered if throwback skins will become more common in LoL and Medler answered:
“Traditional skins – not sure if we’ll call them that or not yet.
“If Viktor’s [throwback skin is] really well received we’d want to consider doing others occasionally.
“We stopped doing that sort of skin years ago because they weren’t at all popular at the time, including with players who owned the skin but seldom chose to use it.”
Meddler also took to the comments to ask what fans preferred name for the skin would be, with ‘Machine Herald Viktor’ one popular suggestion.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
