The future of League of Legends Classic is in your hands

​League of Legends was (and still is) a special game in my heart. I first started playing back in 2010, just a little bit before the start of Season 1. I remember watching old-school tournaments like Go4LoL, World Cyber Games, and even the first Worlds that took place in "Phreak's basement." I continue to play to this day, albeit a bit more sporadically, but I look back at those days fondly. It was the best of times, and yet the worst of times.

League of Legends Classic will take players on a trip to the game’s early era starting July 29. Everything was simpler back then. Champion, ability, and item descriptions were brief, the game was slow-paced, and there was a lot less visual clutter. However, League was also slightly broken. When I started, Xin Zhao was just about to be released. If you were around then, you'll understand the terror that this champion evoked. As a new player, I assumed this is just what League of Legends was all about. Overtuned champions, one-shotting your enemies, and getting burned by an invisible Evelynn who stacked Sunfire Capes. (It's a miracle that I still play.)

Current League players may be thinking, "well, that's how League is now," but it has grown a lot over the past 17 years. It's more fast-paced, there are a ton of quality-of-life updates, and it's far more visually appealing. If the classic era was brought back in a one-to-one state, players would quickly see that the League of Legends of now is in a much better state than in the past. Even with my rose-colored glasses, I can see that the League of yesteryear would be difficult to return to. However, League Classic aims to escape its broken past — with the help of the player community.

In the weeks and months ahead, players will assist the League Classic development team through voting. They'll be able to choose which champions will be added in future updates. But, that's not all: Riot and the Classic dev team now have more tools than ever at their disposal to give the players what they want.

Ahead of the launch later this month, I chatted with Paul Bellezza, executive producer of League of Legends, on how League Classic will continue to grow and evolve in a video call.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Polygon: From what I remember in the past, there were a lot of [champions] that were a bit overtuned. Some of them were pretty broken on launch, but that is what a lot of players want. They want to play these broken champs like dodge Jax, release Xin Zhao, and even Lee Sin with the mechanics that people have now. Will these champs stay in their broken states, or will they be tuned more to stay in line with each other?

Paul Bellezza: I think it's gonna be a mix of both. We want to create the space for those memories to happen again, but then again, we'll balance accordingly. We've learned a lot about how to get to the spirit of it while making it viable, so I trust the dev team. FeralPony is the game director on it and Phreak, David Turley, is one of the designers on it. It's in good hands of who knows where we should play and not play in certain ways, so I think we'll find out what's a happy memory and what's a "Oh, I'm glad everything's evolved."

We're starting with the 40 original champions, and then there are 20 hand selected champions. What was the selection process like for those 20 champs?

I think it was a mix of what were the original 40, and then the ones that were really emblematic at that time. Whalen Rozelle, who works at Riot and has done a lot for esports was like, "I just want AD Akali." So basically just talking to people and the team did a look at themselves and just kind of made an educated guess like, "Here are the ones I think are emblematic of the feeling of that time."

You're not gonna have Yasuo. You're not gonna have Yone. You're not gonna have Yuumi. We kinda drew a line on Yasuo because he was I think November of 2013. … There was definitely a before and after with Yasuo, so we kinda kept it of that era, but we'll see where it goes.

So would Yasuo be in those community votes?

If he does, we'll see what happens. We'll all get to feel that again.

So how is this voting process going to work?

The more you play Classic, then you're going to be given access to this voting survey. Everyone's going to get to do it, but the more you play, we'll give you extra weighting. If you've been playing a long time, it will also help with that as well. It honors those who've been around, or were playing back then.

Back then, champs would come out a lot more often. Every two weeks a champ would come out. Should we expect the same cadence for League Classic?

No, it might be more. You're gonna be voting on who comes next and we can batch them, so you might get a couple champions in an update because we have them, right? In those days, I was the lead champion producer back then. We were getting them out fast, and sometimes we had great ones, and sometimes we learned a lot from those releases. We have some things to look back on that we can create a curated experience for people, but again that's gonna be part of the fun, letting them decide who comes back.

Because champions are coming out a little faster, is there an end to League Classic? At what point does League Classic stop taking from regular League?

This is a good philosophical question. I don't know. I think that's gonna be the fun of working with the community to be like, "What should it do? Where should it go?" In some ways, there's a little bit of a "what if" factor to this, so it all depends on how players show up. We intended to have it on for a little while, and we'll see if it becomes something that goes bigger than that. We're prepared to support it and we'll evolve it with everybody together.

It's truly this opportunity to co-create where it could go, based on so much history and knowledge that people have, but also strong opinions about what should or shouldn't be true. Those are usually different wherever you ask people. In Korea versus Brazil versus China versus Europe, you're gonna get wildly different answers. So it's a fascinating experimental experience.

As an example, Old School RuneScape is somewhat similar to this, but it kind of takes its own path. It also does community voting, but it also implements new things that are not even in RuneScape 3. Could you see League Classic taking its own parallel universe path?

We'll see. I can say all this stuff and unless players ask for that, it's more of a "what if." But it's something we've talked about. There's been a lot of like, "is this an alternate reality?" I don't know if we wanna go that far, but we'll see. We're not spiritually opposed.

That might make things a little more exciting. Maybe a League Classic specific champ or item.

Exactly. There's even small things like that that can make a big difference. So we'll see, you know? I mean the fact that you and I are like, can you generate ideas off that? I mean, that's kind of the fun of it all. I would love to see what the community says, as we go forward.

Will League Classic have a ranked mode as well?

To start, we won't. The start is gonna be like a welcome and have fun. But if that is something that players want and ask for, we have the capability to make that happen. We're gonna go into it letting the players tell us what they want before we go for it, because we don't want to assume that everybody just wants to go in there and swear. We want to see if it's fun first and be guided.

There were a lot of old game modes that came with League of Legends. Twisted Treeline, Dominion, even the "for fun" game modes like All for One was first introduced in Season 3. URF and then ARAM came out shortly after that. Is it possible that we'll see any of these modes come back?

It's possible. To start, it won't. It'll just be the classic Summoner's Rift. However, what's great is we now have the capability to do a lot more. This whole project unearthed a lot of ways to recreate old experiences. … So if the demand is there and the desire is there, it's something we can consider for sure and actually probably have success doing.

I can reveal that we are going to be doing a kind of ARAM Mayhem on the classic map. … It'll have their modern kits and won't be their classic kits. … There will be some kind of Classic-inspired augments that are kind of throwback to the items and some stuff, but the team rallied to say, "let's do something fun, so that we can make a really cool moment."

This is also a dream scenario for a lot of returning players or players who have been around for a long time in that they're technically going back into the past with all of the information that they have now. I imagine a lot of people will go back thinking that they can become the next Faker. Because they have technically figured out the meta, is there a way that Riot is going to try to circumvent that as the meta is already somewhat established?

I think this is a chance for us to evolve it together and see what we should do, because not every modern technique works in the old days. It was a different pace. It was a little more methodical, a little more all-in in some cases than the current League is today. So we shall see, right? It's like going back to your teenage self with the knowledge today. … I actually think it's an incredibly interesting game experiment in that regard. There are not a lot of games that have been able to have this kind of opportunity.

League of Legends Classic will be released on July 29.