League of Legends is infamously a challenging experience for new players to learn.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are notoriously one of the most complex game genres.
It’s why Riot Games recently released the simple Brawl mode, to make the game more digestible.
And alongside that, a recently added feature could drastically improve LoL’s new player experience.
After the most recent update to the PBE where new LoL features are tested, Riot has added a very nice feature to the picks and bans phase.
Players will soon be able to get previews of champions’ abilities and how they work just before starting a game.
In the PBE, when a player hovers over a champion while choosing who to pick, a short video will start playing.
This looping video showcases the champion’s playstyle and is accompanied by tags like crowd control, mobile, and sustained damage to help quickly explain the champion’s kit.
A lot of champions are also marked as either “Beginner friendly” like Ashe and Blitzcrank, or “Hard-to-play” like Irelia and Yasuo.
Some champions don’t have this new tag like Hecarim, as Vandiril showcases in the video above, so the champion is seemingly considered somewhere in the middle.
The second part of this update is that once you have selected a champion, you can now view all of the champion’s abilities with videos and text for each, before loading into the match.
After locking in the champion, players will be able to press a button labelled “Abilities” and select through the character’s passive, Q, W, E, and R.
By giving new players a quick reminder of what their character does and making these easy to find, this feature could be a great change for those trying to pick up the game.
This feature could also be especially helpful for ARAM players who don’t know much about the random champion they’ve been given.
Although with the recent announcement of League of Legends’ ARAM getting its biggest update yet, this shouldn’t be as big an issue with champion cards replacing rerolls.
And while these new features are aimed at new players, some more experienced players are nervous about the change.
Many were quick to point out how slow and buggy LoL’s client can be before loading into a match.
Because of that, some players on social media quickly asked for an option to turn this feature off in case all the added videos take too much RAM and cause the client to crash.
No other details of this update have been revealed. It’s possible the feature may stay on the PBE for a while before being added officially to the game in a live patch.
About a month ago, a sneaky update added WASD movement controls in one of League of Legends’ biggest ever changes.
However, Riot still hasn’t publicly said anything about this new feature and hasn’t officially release it.
Though British content creator Skinspotlights pointed out the option still exists on the PBE. But all files related to it have been renamed to full stops to try and hide the feature.
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.
