The Rift That Does Not Exist Anymore

It wouldn’t be surprising to me if most people that have stayed within the League of Legends ecosystem long enough could still remember the exact circumstances in which they first interacted with the game. Some traumatic memories are too horrible to suppress, after all.

On factual terms, I played my first real LoL match 10 years ago, around the release of the Poppy rework, right between Seasons 5 and 6, which would make me by all accounts a ‘’new wave’’ played of sorts, arriving right after the massive map revamp, the first of the full-blown VGUs, the consolidation of the game as mobility oriented MOBA and the complete calcification of what the game is and represents today, even when so many systems, items, champions and the map itself are unrecognizable from what it was back in 2016.

Post Season 4 LoL is an entity fairly easy to unify, changes may come and go, and entire builds go down the drain within a single patch change, but the undeniable reality of modern LoL is that it has been able to survive in no small part due to its immediate familiarity. I’ve uninstalled League more times than I can remember (an embarrassing thing to admit that’s also a shared experience at this point), yet every time I come back for one reason or another, that surface level readability and learned lessons never go away; pillars of this ruin of a game are predicated of the fact people will reach a point where they cannot put up with it any longer, and so the moment they finally crawl back to this hole need to be as painless as direct as possible. It’s the reason why League is a paradox, simultaneously more and more beginner unfriendly by the day, but also way easier to go back to after a prolonged period of rest; if you are just here to play a couple matches, you don’t even needto read what passive items do, the game practically buys them for you.

It’s as soporific and effective as it sounds, a perfect golden goose that regurgitates the same tired and angry players that may or may not spend their money on the brand-new High Noon skin before going down the gutter again, a vicious cycle that works purely because it is designed for it to work like that. The system works as intended.

To be clear, this is not a LoL hit piece, both because going off on modern League’s problems could be a tirade on its own, and it ignores the reality that League of Legends is a highly competent and well-made 5v5 game. However, its strengths are easy to ignore when the misery piles up so faster, and the idea of stepping into the Rift becomes a borderline anxiety inducing prospect; it’s no secret that for a long time, the places to get the most fun out of LoL have been the modes that don’t take place on the three lane territory or that are not URF, and even then I’d go as far as to say that ARAM is in the worst, most toxic shape it has ever been since I have memory.

Beyond the initial sense of discovery and learning curve, there has never been a version of lol that kept that sense of wonder and mystique, a version that capitalized fully in the desire of exploration and build crafting without getting flamed or reported if you didn’t play near perfectly. I never knew a League that didn’t feel violent towards the player.

At least not one I actively played.

During my pre-teen years and before that, most of the videogame related stuff I learned wasn’t through ads or magazines was always through watching my cousins play some game I had never seen, in a sort of trickle down of exposure that got me into things like Smash Bros. and Pokémon. Discovering stuff either by watching an older family member play it isn’t exactly a singular experience, but whereas most of the people I know interacted with LoL because of pure word of mouth of a friend telling them to install them (that was me, I was the friend telling people to install it and now a spot in hell is waiting for me), I first watched it by being on the same room as two of my other cousins while they were playing them on their old laptops while they talked with friends on what must have been Skype. And I was fascinated.

Showing me a game that I had never seen or heard of before was all you needed to grip my attention, but there was something about League of Legends, a strange combination of my lack of resources to actually play it for myself and my terms and the look of crappy 3D models, horrible sound mixing and shitty color gradience that, to a pair of eyes that didn’t quite understand what they were looking at, felt surreal and captivating. Just watching it felt exciting, the quiet ambience of the select screen and the rift clashing with the boom of the chosen champ and ability sounds filling an active miniature warzone were everyone looked sick as hell and seemed super strong. Cho’Gath and Anivia felt like the coolest things ever designed simply because one got bigger and the other could revive, which was way more rad than a champion being able to dash though walls despite my cousins cussing the soul of the player that picked Talon.

It undeniably had such a strong grip on me because of the novelty, and my feelings wouldn’t have been as strong if I knew what a Warcraft was prior to seeing a single frame of League, but even as I gained a greater understanding of LoL’sintricacies, that awe never vanished. Parts of me recall times one of my cousins lent me their laptop and let me play a match or two, but those memories are clouded by the sheer passage of time and my nervousness and what must have been the most complex videogame I had ever touched; opening the store alone was intimidating, and while my cousin taught me the ropes, there were clear gaps in their own knowledge, things they were still actively still learning even when he had 10 times the experience. I always gave the laptop back to them before I could finish a match ‘cause I was really scared of messing up too badly and some of the characters and the way they moved were actually spooky for the coward young me, but my fixation lived on.

Old League of Legends was the perfect blend of amateurish visual and gameplay decision mixed with an insane strong foundation of fundamentals, and what now could be perceived as mechanical straight-forwardness was playing a bigger part in a far slowe, more methodical MOBA than the quick decision making the LoL asks of you more frequently. It was another beast entirely, and a charming one at that.

Which is exactly why I always wanted to go back to that Summoner’s Rift, even if it was only one time. I wanted to go back, to see if those feelings could return, to see how different it really was… and that version of League…

…Is never coming back.

League of Legends Classics is incredibly self-aware, and unironically it may be one of the best things about it, which should not be confused with a product safe from the self-evident. It stands as a clear nostalgia withdrawal, a sort of side-deck in which Riot has found a niche in which it can capitalize its own past and create the perfect kind of bait for those that left in the early seasons and who may bite the retail release. I cannot conceive a universe where these idea could have existed without the precedent set by RuneScape and WoW a the kind of pitch that featured the words that acivate Riot investors’ dopamine receptors. The fucking thing almost went live with the perk of having to pay to get the old skins, or if we put it literally: smaller polygon counts and shittier models were almost pay-walled.

LoL Classic isn’t available purely out of kindness and passion, and time will show the extent of which Riot’s management and the already set Battle Pass can function to its detriment, but, in spite of a chaotic pre-launch cycle and a profound inability to trust this company’s ability to maintain a system like this in the long run… I really, really enjoy LoL Classic, and out of all the ways it could have been realized, this might have been the healthiest.

The obvious reality is that it was never a matter of that old, idealized version of early seasons LoL coming back or not, because it never existed. I talk your ear off about the Classic LoL I remember, and it would be nothing but the words of some guy speaking about it more than a decade later, trying to de-cipher his own ramblings through rose-tinted glasses. There was never a better past to go back to, because, as it turns out, I fucking lied: LoL, even pre-season 4, was always LoL, it was still the same environment that allows the worst aspects of competitive games to proliferate like the plague and, while monetization could have been way less of a problem and there certainly were no battle passes, it was an absolute mess of a live service experiment dependent on a champion release schedule that might have killed someone and the results of which still affect some champions to this very day. That predatory familiarity was still there, and there was a reason why little on my who play halves of some matches still arrived on Season 5 could jump in with relative ease.

There never, ever was a perfect version of LoL, just the memories so far back in the past that we might trick ourselves into thinking they were such.

If Classic was trying to replicate those specific past seasons to a tea, while interesting for sure, wouldn’t have changed that, but surprisingly enough, from the very second it was announced, I didn’t get the feel I was seeing that kind of localized, precise point in time alien to everything that surrounds it, ‘cause Classic is also its own thing entirely, and that actually rocks.

It should feel like a strange, formless amalgamation of mismatched concepts and pieces that don’t quite fit, but this strange mess of a mosaic that tries to grab all main ideas and versions of characters and items from across the first three seasons of the game is… oddly beautiful? A past that never quite existed, but it isn’t trying to pretend it was; it is that collective memory, that collective feel, that embodies a spirit of pure chaotic fun that never was quite there, but it can sell that illusion.

In a way, everyone becomes a first timer, trying to understand or re-learn the slower pace, more resource management-based systems in a way less stressful context. I played an hour-long game with friends where we lost, and I felt more fun in it than in 20-minute modern League games where I won, and I don’t think that would have been quite possible if this was just Season 2 or 3 but again.

I’ve been playing Classic on and off since release to put my feelings in order and to make sure I’m not going insane, and the more I spend time in it, the more I see the ways this could have embraced its worst aspects of nostalgia glorification, and while it very, VERY clearly still does, it’s also one of the best possible outcomes aanyone could have gotten out an idea like this, let-alone LoL related.

We can never go back the old Rift that exists in out head, it will never exist, and it probably never existed. But if we somehow, maybe by an accident or a particular group of devs that wanted to get out something that could inspire a molecule of fun, can get something that re-studies that pasts and makes something new out of it, tries with all its might to be the best it can be, then how could I not embrace it for a while.

I’d much rather take something that makes new memories than something only trying to revive dead ones.

Thank you so much for reaching this point.