How The Mageseeker solves a League of Legends lore problem
The newest Riot Forge title, The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story, is a beat-’em-up tale of monarchy, magic, and revolution. It works well as a standalone experience; anyone who has ever dabbled in the fantasy genre will recognize its depictions of fearsome dragons and a band of noble rebels. But for League of Legends fans, The Mageseeker is an absolute treasure trove of lore that resolves tired plot hooks and sets up new, scintillating mysteries.
“After we released our first game Moonlighter, apparently some people at Riot had been playing it quite a lot,” says Javi Gimenez, co-founder and CEO of developer Digital Sun, in a call with Polygon. Riot encouraged Digital Sun to pitch a game to Riot Forge in the League universe. The team at Digital Sun started to iterate on a protagonist who could mix and match abilities from other champions — or perhaps a squad with different loadouts of abilities.
Shortly after brainstorming started, Riot released Sylas, a Demacian rebel mage who steals spells from casters around him. “When we saw that champion, we were like, ‘OK – this is a match made in heaven,’” says Gimenez. The Mageseeker was in development for four years, which means that Digital Sun was able to craft Sylas’ post-launch story in a relatively isolated sandbox.
“Sylas is a challenge because he’s not a regular hero — he’s an anti-hero. He’s not a nice guy. That’s fine, because we’re allowed to [have Sylas] do things a regular hero wouldn’t do, but we also need to be very careful that he’s not doing too many terrible things,” says Sara Costa, design director at Digital Sun. The end result is a game that shows Sylas as having been right about the Mageseekers. Is he also right about the Demacian aristocracy, or is he
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