User blog comment:LivesByProxy/Yore Endless Possibilities: A Look At Lore & The Meaning Behind League of Legends/@comment-4664737-20160507140654/@comment-26815373-20160509212224

I'm gonna disagree with your first sentence. It's not that they aren't putting enough effort into it, or lack a dedicated department, in fact, they have a dedicated department and they probably take 'lore' really seriously.

The problem is, it seems to me, that Riot's 'lore' team probably isn't comprised of history-buffs, or geography enthusiasts, or professional linguists. In other words, the people who have insight into how cultures and civilizations actually develop, evolve, and decay, aren't part of the team.

Two examples of this kind of thing come to mind.

The first, Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling wrote H.P. without really considering the implications of the history she was writing. If you're not familiar with the series, basically, magic has existed for a very long time, and is practiced by a sercret community of witches and wizards. However, at no point in her theoretical 'history' of Britain do the magic-users ever play a substantial role. They weren't involved in the American Revolutionary War, nor did they step in during either of the World Wars, which is, frankly, very odd. To suppose that you have a group of people with phenomenal cosmic power that has existed throughout the centuries, only to have no changes in the 'timeline' (that is, history in the H.P. world follows exactly the same course as history in our world) is a strange proposition.

The second example is from Magic: the Gathering. The premise behind Magic is that there are many, many, many worlds, and that certain people ('planeswalkers') can travel to and from them. The Wizard's of the Coast (the people who make Magic) put a lot of effort into 'world building'. You can clearly see this by how they have one world that seems to consist of only ancient Greek culture, with another world based entirely on Japanese culture, while yet another world modeled off only Victorian-era English culture. I'm being sarcastic, of course, as it's absurd to suppose an entire world would resemble any one, tiny piece of part of our world.

I give those two examples because Riot is doing the same things, to some extent.

Also, I don't think that RIot's difficulty in telling stories is due to the game being a MOBA. Rather, I think it's because their approach to story telling is 'a single, all encompassing narrative, featuring each of their characters', as I tried to explain above.

It's worth pointing out that you could be developing their lore right now. It's the internet and LoL Wiki, no one is stopping you. Hell, I'm considering doing that myself.