Champion Roadmap: April 2021[]
- See You on the Other Side
That’s all for today—we should have a lot more to share after we start ramping down Viego's saga. And after going through such a grim story, what else is there to do but take the next leg of the year head on. Get ready for a new marksman (bot lane this time) that will give you an electrifying glimpse into one of Runeterra's most tenacious regions, one that never knows when to quit.
Champion Roadmap: September 2021[]
- Ride The Lightning
We’ll have an electrifying start to 2022 with a brand new bot lane marksman who has been charging up and is rearing to finally get on the Rift. We wanted to create a kinetic marksman who’s always on the move, pulsing with sparky determination. A champ who plays the game at a machine gun pace and brings the feeling of a shooter game to the roster. We also really wanted to explore more unique basic attack concepts in League.
Marksmen are auto-attack champions by nature, and we’ve experimented with altered autos in the past with champs like 
Graves, 
Xayah, and 
Jhin. For this new champ, we wanted to re-explore the role of the basic attack in a marksman champion’s kit and see if we could completely turn its purpose around. I’m getting amped just thinking about it, and if you are as well, get ready for a hyper new champion very early next year.
Champions in Season 2022[]
| “ | So our first new champion this year is Zeri, an electrifying, neon-colored ADC from Zaun. Zeri is a hyperactive bot lane carry whose kit takes inspiration from shooters, specifically from machine guns and assault rifles. She has a pretty unique playstle for an ADC. So instead of auto attacking, her Q is a skillshot that she uses to do everything other bot laners would use their attacks for. Zeri still has an auto attack, it's just not her primary way to farm, do damage, or take objectives. It's meant to be used sparingly at just the right moments. Her auto attacks also count as spells. This means they can trigger item effects that would normally trigger with spells instead of autos. This leads to a rapid fire play pattern that we hope feels unique from other champions. Basically, if you want to play Zeri, my advice is to never stop moving. |
| — Ryan 'Reav3' Mireles[3] | |
 |
Champion Insights: Zeri[]
By Erika 'Cashmiir' Haas[4]
Editorial Note: Hey everyone! You may notice some shocking similarities between Zeri and VALORANT’s new agent, Neon—and that’s because you should! These characters were developed together by the same team. If you’d like to learn more about Neon, head over to VALORANT’s site to read more.
What if we told you Zaun isn’t just a city overwhelmed by caustic pollution, rampant inequality, and volatile technologies? That there’s more beneath the layer of toxic haze. That it’s a place where magic doesn’t just exist, it thrives; a place that values community above all else; a place that embraces the flaws of the people who call it home.
Well, now we have another way to experience this shockingly vibrant, neon-colored, side of Zaun. And her name is Zeri.
- Bringing Precision to Bot Lane
Most League champs start as a creative seed—something the team uses as a jumping off point. But rather than a gameplay hook, someone from our lore, or a beautiful piece of concept art, Zeri began her life as a gun.
“Shooters are interesting because they’re very high precision games. Aim matters—it’s one of the most important things you can do,” explains principal game designer August Browning. “In League, ADCs can attack really fast, but they’re not really engaging in a precision game the way you do in FPSs. 
Ezreal, Mr. Skillshot Man, is the closest we have to that, but he’s still not quite there. There’s something really satisfying when you spray down someone in a FPS that we don’t get with ADCs, so we wanted to see if we could bring that feeling to League.”
League’s got a lot of guns, but none of them really capture the feeling August was going for. So it was time to bring a new gun to the Rift: the assault rifle.
Assault rifles are a staple in tac shooters. They offer the feeling of spraying a controlled cluster of bullets at high speed, as opposed to the mouse-point accuracy of a sniper rifle or the spray-and-pray of an LMG. But there was still a foundational problem with the entire concept: How do you bring precision-based autos to League when playing ADC is all about right clicking?
We all love a good “attack-move until they die” champ like 
Jinx or 
Kog'Maw. But right clicking doesn’t really give you the dopamine rush that you get when you flick headshot an enemy. So, in order to give Zeri the high-precision fantasy, August decided to make Zeri’s “autos” a skillshot.
“But Riot, you literally just said that ADCs ask you to right click... How do you right click a skillshot?
Easy. Zeri autos with her Q.
“We don’t design champions with an alternative form of auto attacks just to be different. It’s a way to deliver a very specific feeling when playing as the character,” August explains. “Zeri has unique autos because we wanted to bring the FPS precision fantasy to League. But that means she has a higher learning curve than other ADCs. A good Zeri is going to be moving around a lot to land all of her Qs, but it’ll take a little bit of playing to get to that point since it’s different from most of the other ADCs in the roster.”
Beyond gunplay, Zeri also brings another common mechanic from shooters: movement. But before you start thinking “what the actual f*&^ Riot???” just hear us out.
Movement’s not a novel idea in games—we’ve talked about mobility quite a bit before, but the way it works in League is very different from shooters.
Shooters require you to move quickly between points, set up flanks, and navigate vertical obstacles to pick people off (or to miss all of your Op shots). And while League’s got TPs, flanks, and the occasional case of running it down, these don’t capture the “full rush” feeling that your team seems to always do in comp matches. That meant Zeri needed something that captured the high mobility sprinter feeling, while still working in League.
It was around this time that concept artist Nancy “Riot Sojyoo” Kim drew a spread for Zeri, and one of the options had a seemingly simple addition: rollerblades.
“I really didn’t like Zeri with roller skates at first,” August laughs. “But when I was thinking about cool ways to do mobility, I thought that they actually kind of fit. I could imagine Zeri skating on the pipes around Zaun. It made me think of skateboarding games where you just go up to a wall or halfpipe and just grind down the whole thing. So, yeah... Zeri can do that. She just grinds over any wall in the game.”
In addition to her ability to leap over walls, Zeri has another unique interaction with them—wall banging.
“Something I really enjoy doing in VALORANT is wall banging,” August shares. “It’s basically when you shoot people through thin walls and whatnot. Even though you can’t see them, you might be able to hear them and shoot them through the wall. Zeri’s W is basically that: She fires a shot and if it hits a wall, it extends through the wall and hits enemies on the other side. It’s sort of inspired by an Op shot, but League’s walls are very different to VALORANT’s. It answers the question, ‘What happens if you were to shoot an Op through a wall in League?’ Since missiles in League ALREADY go through walls it probably needs to do something special when it comes into contact with one.”
- Biolightning McQueen
Beyond gunplay, Zeri’s development started with another goal: Making a League champ and a VALORANT agent in tandem. Around 20% of League players also play VAL, so we wanted to see if we could make a set of characters that felt similar so you could run it down on your main in both games. Which honestly was kind of a challenge.
League and VALORANT don’t have much in common—unless you count Scuttle (RIP). But one of the underlying similarities in both games is that the playable characters have unique sources of power.
“I worked closely with Riot Sojyoo and one of the senior concept artists on VALORANT, Konstantin ‘Zoonoid’ Maystrenko to brainstorm a lot of different ideas,” recalls concept art lead Gem “Lonewingy” Lim. “We had so many ideas! Origami paper magic, graffiti, fog and soot, light magic, liquid metal and mercury, human printer, baseball girl, VR gamer girl... And then someone suggested a bioluminescent, electric eel girl, which we all thought was really cool.”
Runeterrans can be born with magic no matter what region they call home. Ionians have a higher chance of being born magical than people from regions like Piltover or Zaun, but it’s not impossible. And while we have a few magic-wielding champions who call the twin cities home, most of them are powered by Hextech and Chemtech.
Zeri’s magic manifests from within, like a human battery, and it’s strong. Like, really, really strong. And because she’s so young and hasn’t quite figured out how to use it consistently, sometimes it manifests in ways she can’t control.
“Zeri’s still coming into her powers. She’s pretty different from a lot of the champions in Piltover and Zaun who are older and more reassured in their strength, like 
Vi, 
Viktor, or 
Jayce,” narrative writer Michael “SkiptoMyLuo” Luo shares. “She has some similarities to 
Ekko in that way. But where Zeri is different is how her magic works. She can’t control her powers yet, and she’s actually a bit of a mess. She’s anxious, she’s clumsy. She’s just all over the place, which fits that electric theme really well because she’s just going really fast all the time. I think that this emotionally-charged electrical personality fits with August’s gameplay really, really well.”
Zeri’s ultimate is the manifestation of her high energy, electric state. She becomes incredibly pumped up, ready to take on everything, and is overflowing with electrical energy. What this means in game is she receives an attack speed and movement speed steroid, charging into the fight, getting hyped up at how well she’s using her power.
But this level of magic doesn’t come without its drawbacks.
Imagine being a source of constant electricity that becomes less controllable when you’re feeling strong emotions. You need to be wary when you hug your parents, or when you have your first kiss. Even a nightmare in your sleep could make you lose control.
With her volatile magic, Zeri could so easily be seen as a problem to fix by the citizens of Piltover. But luckily Zeri’s not from Piltover. She’s a Zaunite. And Zaun has a different take on how to handle someone who’s different: One that’s less focused on democratizing magic for the masses, but instead uplifting what makes their community unique, what makes it beautiful beneath the layer of grime, what makes it Zaun.
- The Bayanihan Spirit in Zaun
There’s a lot to consider when we’re making new champions: difficulty, gameplay fantasy, and silhouette (to name a few). But beyond these, we want players from everywhere to have a champion they can relate to—someone they see themselves in.
A lot of our champions have been inspired by the stories and cultures of the devs who work on them, like 
Akshan's penchant for Bollywood-esque theatrics, or 
Samira's immigrant’s story. And Zeri is no exception.
“It was my personal goal to make Zeri Filipina. Not just because I’m from the Philippines, but because gaming is such a huge part of life there, and there isn’t much representation for us in games—especially for Filipina women. In fact, there are only like... four Filipina video game characters I can think of,” Lonewingy shares. “When SkiptoMyLuo pitched the electric eel idea I wrote a sort of...” She laughs. “I wrote this very grade school story about a girl who belongs to a middle class family in Zaun, who couldn’t control her powers. She’d cause blackouts in her neighborhood—which are really common in the Philippines! We actually had a huge blackout caused by jellyfish that got sucked into a tube at a power plant!
“So I was just thinking of this lighthearted, clumsy girl. But it just... It felt so right to me,” Lonewingy smiles. “There’s this word in Tagalog called ‘kababayan’ and it’s used to describe a fellow Filipino—someone from your village, your neighbor, or just anyone. We’re a very family- and village-oriented culture, and we believe in helping everyone out. I wanted Zeri to have that core part of Filipino culture ingrained in her because I view Zaun as a place that would have that neighborhood culture. Then SkiptoMyLuo took my silly story and made it much better.”
(SkiptoMyLuo unmutes in the call and scoffs at this comment.)
“Those conversations were super inspiring! I latched really hard onto them, especially the part about her being a lovable mess. In Zaun we have this incredibly fascinating environment that’s very grimdark—it’s hard to survive there,” SkiptoMyLuo offers. “But the other side is that it’s also a city of gritty beauty that we really love. There are all of these lovable characters there, like Ekko, who reinforce the feeling that Zaun isn’t a place that should be written off and forgotten. And I think champions like Zeri really help bring that out in another way. It’s not just about her, it’s about her family and the whole community of Zaun around her.”
So, going back to the whole “Zeri has an insane, difficult-to-control level of power” thing... That’s where her neighborhood and family come into play.
Everything Zeri has—and is—is from her community, not from the ultra rich Chem-barons and their corporations. Her jacket, a neighbor’s hand-me-down, was modified by her father to dampen her powers and let her hug her family. Her gun was lovingly made by her mother from industrial scraps found by neighbors who wanted to help her direct her powers. And in turn they asked for nothing. But nothing isn’t good enough for Zeri. She needs to return the unconditional love and support they give her. And so she fights for them. She fights for Zaun.
“I think... I think we’re all really proud of who Zeri ended up becoming,” SkiptoMyLuo smiles. “When Lonewingy told me about the importance of community in the Philippines, it just all sort of clicked: Zeri’s a community-made hero. It has this nice cohesion when the game design, narrative, and art all come together. She’s not perfect or anything, but she definitely stands out in Zaun and adds a bit of lightheartedness and joy. But unlike characters like Seraphine, she understands the grim realities of her home. She’s not naive, and she’s far from being ready to save the world or anything, but she’s trying her best despite all her mess ups.”
And luckily she has the rest of Zaun—her community—to catch her when she falters.Co-Developing Neon & Zeri[]
By Erika 'Cashmiir' Haas[5]
We’ve talked about how we design Agents in the past—and we talk about making League champions a lot. This time we want to share more about how we made Neon because it’s a bit different from how we usually do things. But first, a quick refresher.
We design Agents through a process called DNA. A game designer, narrative writer, and concept artist are assigned to an upcoming Agent, and in the beginning, there’s just a starting seed—like a design, narrative, or diversity goal. This could be making another Radiant, or adding another duelist to the roster, or exploring a different region of the world with a character who calls it home.
From there, the core team (because there are a lot more folks involved than just DNA) brainstorms... a lot. They toss around ideas, create paper prototypes, write flash bios, and draw spreads of concept art.
Slowly we have someone who feels unique, cohesive, and adds something exciting to the current roster. Then bam, you have 500 files named finalfinalFINALIPROMISE, hundreds of animations, meshes breaking in places no one knew possible, sound effects playing randomly, wait why is their face texture on their hands... Oh look, we have an Agent!
They release, armchair designers come out of the woodwork on Reddit, Twitter explodes with an overabundant amount of fan art, and everyone turns on all chat to flame Rioters in-game.
Except, that’s not Neon’s story.
Listen, we go on the internet. We’ve seen your fan theories and side-by-side comparisons of Neon and Zeri, League’s newest champ. And to officially set the record straight: No, they’re not the same characters, no they’re not related, but they were made in tandem by the League and VALORANT teams.
“How did it get started?” You ask. As many things do, the Agents Team Lead John “Riot MEMEMEMEME” Goscicki and League Champions Team Lead Ryan “Reav3” Mireles were scheming.
- Might Mess Around and Make Character Together
“A long time ago we were brainstorming what we could do for the launch of Arcane (League’s new animated show on Netflix—go watch it). It was a huge moment for all of us at Riot, so I messaged Goscicki to ask if he wanted to co-launch a champion and Agent together during the event,” recalls Mireles.
“It made a lot of sense, a lot of the VALORANT Agents team worked on the Champions team before—Goscicki included—and we share a lot of the same processes. And a lot of Riot players play both League and VALORANT. So we thought it’d be cool if they could play these two characters in both games,” Mireles shares.
“I actually remember that even before that conversation, you and I would message each other and say, ‘One day we’ll co-launch characters. One day we’ll collaborate and it’ll be cool,’” laughs Goscicki. “And then when this opportunity came up we were like, ‘IS TODAY THE DAY???’ And yes, it finally was the day.”
But before they got started, the team needed to figure out what they were actually making.
League and VALORANT are very different games in very different IPs. Sure, they’re both online competitive games developed by a small indie company with a penchant for nerfing your main. But League’s set in a fantasy world where champions actually use abilities to get kills, whereas in VALORANT, shooting matters and you don’t kill with abilities (allegedly). They just create tactical opportunities to take the right shot.
That meant Mireles and Goscicki needed to do a bit of groundwork before development really began.
“When either of our teams get started, we generally have a pretty good understanding of our goals. But when it came to Zeri and Neon we just... didn’t really know what that space looked like,” admits Mireles.
“In League we have diversity goals in terms of role, region, gender, and playstyle. VALORANT has most of these as well—but they’re very different from what we do in League. So we needed to make sure we found a space that was good for both of our games, and was exciting for players. Because if no one wanted to play these characters, what was the point?” Mireles asks.
That meant the characters needed to stand on their own. Sure, a bunch of us play both games, but the majority choose one and stick with it. And while adding a mute K-pop heartthrob who assassinates people with magical moon weapons gifted from his twin sister who lives in space to VALORANT just because Aphelios exists in League might be a fun idea, that doesn’t mean it works.
Old friends and good intentions aside... how the actual f*&^ do you design a champ and an Agent together? The answer is surprisingly simple: Combine teams.
- Lightning Can Strike Twice
“I’m a huge fan of VALORANT. When it first released, I talked to a few of the game designers on the team like, ‘You know, I’d love to make an Agent some time...’ And so when we were told about this opportunity I just jumped at it,” Game Designer August “August” Browning laughs. “Making two characters in tandem meant we faced a bunch of new constraints, which is fun and exciting as a designer. We needed to find a shared power source—but something that works in both League and VALORANT. We needed to figure out if their personalities were similar or opposite and complementary... There were so many questions that needed to be answered.”
Let’s start with the power source.
League’s a world of endless possibilities when it comes to sources of power for its champions. There’s a space dragon who created the cosmos, a doll with magic scissors, and a literal mountain (whose ultimate is to move really fast—don’t ask). VALORANT has two: Tech and Radiants.
Raze throws grenades, Killjoy uses bots, and Cypher is Great Value Inspector Gadget. Phoenix throws solar fire, Jett uses wind, and Sage resurrects her allies in front of a cracked enemy with an Op. So the team decided to brainstorm some ideas for a shared power source across both games.
During brainstorms, Concept Artists Konstantin “Zoonoid” Maystrenko, Nancy “Riot Sojyoo” Kim, and Gem “Lonewingy” Lim talked about the common denominators between League and VALORANT. The first being speed.
VALORANT rewards you for good rotations, ego peeking, silent flanking, and flash banging your entire team as they push the point. Whereas League’s about running it down mid setting up flank TPs to enable your fed top laner to push a side lane while you goon squad mid. And while there are plenty of Agents who are really mobile (nerf Jett), there’s no one who literally embodies speed.
“Neon’s constant access to speed means she’s the most mobile Agent in VALORANT,” Game Designer Ryan “rycou” Cousart explains. “She completely shatters what we know about speed and mobility in the game and will heavily test players’ moment-to-moment decision making as a duelist. With great risk comes electrifying rewards.” :) LOL (Addition insisted upon by Cousart.)
But “move fast” isn’t a power source. Sure, running laps on the enemy team is fun, but other than “run really fast” what can they do? So the team took a step back to find a source of power, something that explains why Neon and Zeri would go fast.
“We landed on the idea of electricity, which lent itself to the speed idea,” shares Lim. “But it also had this nice tie-in to where we wanted these characters to be from in the real-world: the Philippines. I grew up in Manila, and we were planning on making Filipina characters—something that means a lot to me, personally. And in Manila we have a lot of blackouts, and electricity problems in general. It just felt like a nice little nod to life there.”
Lightning also fit who these characters became.
“We latched onto this narrative concept of positive and negative when we saw the electricity concept art. Both Neon and Zeri have this feeling of fighting for their communities, but we still wanted them to be their own people,” explains Narrative Writer Michael “SkiptoMyLuo” Luo.
“Neon’s the negative charge and Zeri’s the positive. Neon’s prickly and a bit more guarded—blunt, sarcastic, slightly biting. It seems like she doesn’t care about you, but deep down she does care and wants to do the right thing. Compared to Zeri’s warm, bright—but still stubborn and impatient at times—personality, we just felt like it was a cool way to tie their electricity theme into who they are,” Luo adds.
Both Neon and Zeri come from big, supportive families and communities—something inspired by the “Bayanihan Spirit” in Filipino culture—but what makes them different is their reaction to it.
“Neon comes from a big family in the heart of Manilla,” explains Narrative Writer Joe “Riot ParmCheesy” Killeen. “Unlike Zeri, who embraces the love and support from her family, Neon is overwhelmed by it. She still loves them, and has a strong sense of service and duty for her community, but she’s more withdrawn. It’s just a different reaction to a similar upbringing, which we thought was a cool opportunity to explore while making these characters.”
- "Why Not?"
But combining forces to make characters together still had its challenges. And while we’re one company, we’re still talking about two wholly different games.
“August had some really... interesting ideas for gameplay early on in development,” laughs Cousart. “We knew we wanted to go with speed, and he pitched the idea that Neon had full access to a sprint at all times. With no cooldown.
Speed’s one of the ways we can create consistent learnability in VALORANT. Pros and high-level players can tell you the exact amount of time it takes to go from site-to-site, so the idea that we should just shatter that honestly gave us night terrors,” he continues.
Another early game design idea for Neon was a one-shot LIGHTNING HANDS mechanic that was completely accurate while running and reset (don’t ever complain about something being OP again, thanks). And while this was certainly a unique take on an Agent, it was too much. So the team pulled back and put some design constraints into place: No one-shots, sure. Cooldown on sprint? Ehhh... About that.
Neon’s fantasy is to run fast and zap people while doing it. And restricting her access to speed left her feeling pretty sluggish. That meant August and Cousart needed to ask themselves a hard question: Is it worth challenging what we know about movement in VALORANT?
“We decided to go with giving Neon constant access to speed, at all times, with no cooldowns,” August shares. “Instead of going with the cooldown we restricted the strength of it in other ways. Like making it so her guns are down and she can’t jiggle peek at high speeds. This means you’re at risk whenever you want to use her speed, a stronger knife run in many ways. We just felt like, overall, this made more sense for her power fantasy, which is to run fast for extended periods of time.”
“Something August really helped with was challenging the way we think about designing Agents overall, not just Neon,” Cousart shares. “Every time he encountered a guardrail we’d had in place for VALORANT design he just asked us ‘Why not? Why can’t we do this thing?’ It taught us a lot of things: Why VALORANT is different from League, sure. But it also helped us realize where the similarities are.
Cousart continues, “I’m not saying that every guardrail should be smashed, but it taught us to test what we thought was our limit previously, instead of pushing to try new things. It made us learn more about our own game, and changed the way we think about design on Agents in the future.”
But don’t worry. If you’re really concerned about what this means for our next Agents, rest assured that the next one’s definitely not a duelist.Trivia[]
- Zeri was co-developed with the
Valorant team and released as a cross-game promotion with the Agent Neon.[6] Both characters share the same voice actor (Vanille Velasquez[7]), hairstyle, and are themed around electricity. They also share a patch on their face, resembling positive and negative electric charges, with Zeri having a plus shaped patch and Neon having a minus shaped patch. This is a reference to their personalities, Zeri being the more positive and cheerful one and Neon being less. - Zeri is inspired by Filipino culture.[8]
- Zeri not having access to her electric powers was inspired by the brown outs in the Philipines.[9]
- Zeri's Japanese voice actor is Haruka Shiraishi[10].
- Zeri and Renata Glasc were both created as Zaun champions as they were originally planned to ship with the RiotX Arcane event before being delayed.[11]
- Zeri's codename in development was Zaun ADC.[12]
- Zeri's placeholder model in development was a recolored Samira.
- During development, Spark Surge started as a Tumble that ignored walls.[13]
- Zeri's kit was inspired by first-person shooters, with Burst Fire mimicking assault rifles and Ultrashock Laser mimicking sniper rifles.[14]
- Scrapped Zeri abilities in development include:[15][16]
- A version of Living Battery that increases shields she receives.
- A version of Ultrashock Laser that was on a 5 second cooldown and was casted like Burst Fire.
- A version of Lightning Crash that gave her 150% bonus movement speed and would not fall off until she took damage.
- A version of
Media[]
- Related Music
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- Main article: Summoner icon
- Main article: Ward skins
- Main article: Emotes
References
- ↑ Champion Roadmap: April 2021
- ↑ Champion Roadmap: September 2021
- ↑ Champions in Season 2022
- ↑ Champion Insights: Zeri
- ↑ Co-Developing Neon & Zeri
- ↑ Reav3 on Zeri and Neon
- ↑ Zeri VA
- ↑ Reav3 on Zeri Culture
- ↑ Reav3 on Zeri Electricity
- ↑ Zeri Japanese VA
- ↑ Reav3 on Zeri and Renata Being Zaunites
- ↑ August on Zeri Placeholders
- ↑ August on Zeri's Spark Surge
- ↑ August on Zeri W Inspiration
- ↑ August on Scrapped Zeri Spells 1
- ↑ August on Scrapped Zeri Spells 2