The latest video from Riot Games is a League of Legends cinematic entitled A New Dawn. The video shows the immense level of care put into its creation, with a level of quality comparable to the best animated features. It’s a brief tale of an encounter between two groups of five champions, the usual groupings that do battle in League of Legends. Here, though, we get a closeup look at some of the most popular champions, and some insight into their personalities as they battle.
“The goal of this particular piece was we wanted to dive into the League of Legends universe with a bigger, more diverse cast,” proclaims the Behind the Scenes video that accompanies this piece. It’s an engaging glimpse into the thinking behind this cinematic, and shows some of the elaborate foley work and the orchestral accompaniment that was created for it.
Aside from being an impressive piece of entertainment for its own sake, the video served a useful marketing purpose as well. “A cinematic of this depth leads to champion discovery,” said Riot CEO Brandon Beck. “It forces us to go deeper in understanding the characters we are trying to portray.” That leads to a richer backstory and a more attractive world that can engage players to an even greater extent.
Will Riot do something more with all of this effort put into character development, backstory and animations Certainly fans would love to see an animated feature, but so far Riot has shown little interest in anything but League of Legends itself. President Marc Merrill did remark last year, though that “We do intend to make the ‘s’ in Riot Games mean something.” That’s about as much of Riot’s future plans as we are likely to know . . . for now. One thing seems certain, though – we’re going to see more high-quality animation from Riot. This video already has over 10 million views in less than a week.
