Riot has finally unveiled League of Legends Classic, a return to what many seem to think was a kinder, more simple era of its world-spanning MOBA. Its announcement, with more details to come next month, has been met with curious optimism by much of the community, keen to see exactly which of LoL's many eras the Classic experience will attempt to recreate. But as someone who was there for most of those eras, I'm here to tell you this: you do not know what you are asking.
I started playing League of Legends at the end of Season 1, in the summer of 2011. Now, in my early 30s, that 15-year span means the part of my life that includes this game will soon be longer than the part of my life from which it was absent. And in that time, I've seen an awful lot that makes me keen to stay firmly in League of Legends' present rather than its past.
AP Master Yi. Garen with six Sunfire Capes. AP Sion with an on-click stun. The old Runes system. The old Summoner's Rift. Taric with an on-click stun. Old Urgot. Old Skarner. Old Ryze. The other old Ryze. Old Jungle. Old Dragon. AP Tristana. Launch Syndra. Launch Darius. Launch Zyra. Dodge chance (that you could pay to increase). AP Warwick. Gold generation attached to in-game items (but that you could also pay to increase). Lane assignments decided by who could shout the loudest in champ select. Dozens more design choices and misadventures lost to history but that certainly didn't make for a better game experience. Old League was a Wild West that was pulled into shape one frontier at a time.
Clearly, this era of League wasn't a complete disaster. The core experience was still good enough to turn it into one of the biggest games in the world, with an enormous esports scene and millions of monthly players, and it does still hold advantages over some aspects of the modern game. The item and rune systems, which have chased optimization in recent years, used to focus more on unique strategy than the current push for statistical dominance allows. A smaller roster allowed new characters to hold court; at 173 champions, the roster is now so stacked that the only way a new arrival can feel unique is to have ability tooltips that stretch into multiple paragraphs of explainer text.
In this older era, there were more ways to bend League of Legends to your will. A huge part of its early charm was that Wild West feel, which for my friends led to ridiculous strategies that we gave even more ridiculous names; 'Vastly Enhanced' used the lane-pushing power of Banner of Command and ZZ'Rot Portal in tandem to out-macro enemy teams; 'Heimer's Hairy Heroes' focused on pillaging the enemy jungle with a squad of animal characters all attempting to keep a solo Heimerdinger safe in the botlane. Elsewhere, the influencer scene was full of innovators pushing silly ideas because the game let them in a way it no longer does.
Modern League is not without its problems. Power and complexity creep run rampant, monetization has been pushed further and further, individual expression has been squashed. But for those faults, League of Legends is undeniably a better game than it used to be. Champions might be more complex, but they look and play better, with far more opportunity for counterplay than the age of on-click stuns and three-hit passives ever allowed. The entire game looks better, with the modern Summoner's Rift such a dramatic improvement over the original that I can scarcely believe what I used to play on. Arena and ARAM have been established as excellent additions that go a long way towards replacing the creativity stripped from the core experience. Onboarding still has a long way to go, but it's far better than it used to be, with gradual QoL improvements that help newcomers but don't hinder veterans. And that's to say nothing of a wider ecosystem that has been hugely improved by the arrival of adjacent experiences like Arcane and TFT.
Balance is better, game design more confident, player experience improved at almost every level. Riot's even worked hard to bring League of Legends' notoriously toxic community into line, and the amount of genuinely bad behavior I now see is vanishingly rare. Modern League is better than League Classic is likely to be at almost every turn. But the real issue that this vision of the past faces isn't even in the quality of the game – it's in the attitude of its players and the reality of the experience they're searching for.
An obvious comparison to League Classic is WoW Classic. Blizzard rewound the clock on World of Warcraft, and in doing so returned players to a version of the game's world that was otherwise lost to time. Both Azeroth's narrative and geography, and the promise the launch version offered of a new kind of MMO experience were things that could be recaptured and re-experienced. League of Legends is not that kind of game. Endlessly repeating, and driven in part by player skill but more importantly by an extraordinary amount of player data, it's shaped by overlays and stat websites that have optimized the games and its players in a way that I don't think League Classic can shake.
Nostalgia is a powerful draw. But when you discover that your favorite old champion is just a badly-designed version of their current form, and you're up against an AP Master Yi enhanced by modern players' ability and game knowledge, all while your teammates grief each other over who got dibs on playing midlane, you might find that this isn't quite the same kind of Classic experience that's breathed new life into other games.
