Regarding the ongoing debate about additional game-modes for LoL, I'd like to add something, too. :smallsmile:
I used to play WarCraft 3 a lot, too (in fact, it was the only game where I got good enough to count myself as "highly competitive" - I never played enough to actually get to the top of the ladder, or even just to a high level, but I did boost my matchmaking rating to a point where I was occasionally playing against people from the top 200 of the 1v1 ladder. And, quite a few times, winning.). And there were tons of custom maps for it - I'd guess tens of thousands. I could see a lot of them being remade into really fun mods for LoL, but I concede that this might require an overly huge resource investment, in particular for the mods very different from the basic game.
Here's the thing though. Amongst all those games, there were many MOBAs, too. Some of them were essentially DotA-clones, thus not notably different from LoL (EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying LoL is like DotA; anybody who knows me a bit should know that I love LoL and loathe DotA with a passion and use it as my primary example for "How to design a game as awfully and un-fun as possible"; but the map-layout, game objective and other core design elements
are similar).
But some were, in spite of clearly belonging to the same genre,
drastically different in actual gameplay. And I imagine they wouldn't be any more difficult to implement than Twisted Treeline or Crystal Scar were, nor would LoL's core design and balance clash too much with the way they were designed (at least if one took only the relevant interesting additional elements, tossing out the stuff that didn't fit LoL at all), yet adding them to LoL would create a very new and refreshing experience, in my opinion.
So I'd like to describe a few of those maps here:
- Desert of Exile
Desert of Exile had the same core set up as LoL - two bases with a "nexus", connected with a few lanes (four, not three, but that's not that important), towers along the lanes, and minions spawning on all the lanes and running towards the other side. It was played from left to right, and was a overall a bit bigger than Summoner's Rift, in particular in terms of length. In place of inhibitors, there were barracks, different in two things from LoL inhibitors; one of those being that it were the barracks themselves that spawned the minions, and if those barracks were destroyed, there would be no spawn for the lane anymore at all. They wouldn't respawn, either.
Unlike LoL, though, each side had a small secondary base on both the top-most and bottom-most lane, way closer to the front than the main base. Those small secondary bases contained a ring of towers, protected by walls, barracks (the main base had barracks only for the two middle lanes, not for these top and bottom ones), and a fountain (no shop though, and without a fountain laser). Between these secondary bases, there was just no man's land, no towers.
Obviously, if you managed to kill one of the enemy team's secondary bases, you would have a massive advantage - you would have an entire lane where you would still have your spawn and the enemy wouldn't. This was quite difficult though, as the secondary bases were heavily fortified, with a lot of towers.
Here enters the real innovation of Desert of Exile: Most of your gold probably wouldn't go into items (items were quite cheap and not very strong, more used to tweak your champion in a certain way, rather than being crucial for scaling). Instead, at any time, you could spend money at any barracks of your side (without the necessity to be there; if you were bot lane, you could still spend money at the top-lane's barracks, if you wished to). Specifically, you could buy up to a certain number of units (3 or 4, I think? It's been a while) that would be added to the next wave. These units ranged from dedicated siege minions that were extremely good at killing towers, over healers, to keep your push going, over extremely strong tank minions, all the way to fliers, which couldn't be targeted by most heroes or units. With special points that you got on each kill or assist you could even buy special, big monsters, that could very well pose a danger even to an enemy champion.
This, naturally, added a whole new layer of strategy - which minions to buy, on which lane, and when? When to save up, when to spend? And so on.
Desert of Exile had another, fascinating mechanic, but that mechanic cannot really be implemented into LoL, as it would have to have been part of champion design from the very start to work. Since it was quite interesting though, I'd like to at least mention it, hence the spoilers:
Spoiler
Show
Desert of Exile had a certain number of conditions - basically CC effects - like "burning" (takes damage over time), "ruined" (has lowered defences) or "crippled" (powerful damage reduction). Every champion had some abilities that interacted with those conditions - be it by bestowing them on enemies, moving them from one target to another (ideally from a friendly target to a hostile one, or at least from the carry to the tank, or such), etc.
Here the fascinating part, though: A lot of champions had abilities that had special effects if their target was afflicted by particular conditions - basically like Brand's abilities have bonus effects on things that are Ablaze, or Anivia's E deals bonus damage to things that are Chilled - except in Desert of Exile, more often than not, abilities of a champion had special effects based on conditions that the champion itself was not able to bestow - basically, as if it was flipped around and Brand's abilities had bonus effects on units that were Chilled and Anivia's E dealt bonus damage to things that were Ablaze instead, except that both Ablaze and Chilled would be conditions that not just Brand and Anivia could hand out, but a fair number of other champions as well. This created much more intricate champion synergies and chances for cooperation.
- Stand of the Elves
Stand of the Elves was an example of a MOBA with asymmetrical objectives. One side (the Undead) had the usual goal: Kill the enemy nexus. The other side though (the Elves), had a different objective: Simply survive 30 minutes. Accordingly, the map was asymmetrical as well - in the middle was the base of the elves, with six entrances (two on each side, one top, one bot), and consisting of a double ring towers with the nexus in the middle. In each corner of the map, the Undead had one base that was essentially indestructible (their towers had absurdly high resilience and damage, so that for all intents and purposes, it was impossible to kill them), with teleportation platforms allowing them to jump between the bases at will; a lane would go from each of the Undead bases to one of the side-entrances of the Elf-base. The Undead also had stronger waves (basically, they had siege minions, the Elves did not). To put extra pressure on the Elves, every five minutes, a single big wave would spawn above the Elf-base, and rush to the top-entrance, and the Undead could (by making a major gold investment) purchase a (destructible) outpost in the south that would perpetually spawn waves to assault the Elf-bottom-entrance. To make up for this, the Elves only had to hold out long enough (though they would naturally still have to keep pushing the lanes, to make it more difficult for the Undead to overrun them).
Also, different heroes had different damage types - some might, for instance, have an auto-attack that dealt significantly reduced damage to both minions and heroes, but deal massively increased damage to towers, some might be extra-good at clearing minions, others might have an edge against heroes, and so on.
- Regicide
Regicide was based on the same principle as Stand of the Elves - one side (the Rebels) has to kill the enemy nexus, the other side (the Royalists) only have to hold out for a while (different game-modes here, but usually 45 minutes). The main difference was in the map layout - while Stand of the Elves had just a small base in the middle of the map for the defending side, and the attackers came from many directions, here, the attackers all started in the south, and the defender's base was
huge - taking up some 90% of the map, in fact, all lined with towers and unit-spawning barracks.
It had a very interesting dynamic - in the beginning, the Rebels would have it tough, as the Royalists would have a ton of unit-spawning barracks, so their waves would be quite strong and difficult to push against. But as soon as the Rebels managed to finally kill the first few barracks (usually either by the usual back-and-forth of lane fighting or by surprisingly changing the focus of their attack (there were three entrances into the enemy base)), the flow of Royalist minions would diminish, and the Rebels would snowball into pushing faster and harder. In most of the games of Regicide I've played, it played out extremely narrowly - either the Rebels finally pushed through and won with only few minutes to spare, or the Royalists won, with it being quite evident that just a few minutes more, and the Rebels would have gotten through.
The nexus here was, incidentally, a King that actually fought himself, when attacked, casting abilities and so forth. Think Baron Nashor, basically.
Furthermore, both sides could, in addition to buying items, also spend their gold on permanently adding new units (of new types, with different specializations) to all wave spawns, or upgrade all of their side's minions in various regards (defense, attack, and so on).
Lastly - though this is, again, something that couldn't really be implemented into LoL - it had champions that would simply be unthinkable in LoL, but actually worked in this game-mode. How about a champion, for example, that could build proper, regular towers? Better than regular towers, in fact? Permanent ones? And able to have like 8 of them out at a time?
___
So, what I would really like to see (and am actually somewhat surprised it doesn't exist already) would be LoL maps, still PvP, still MOBA, but with added aspects like (not necessarily all of them in the same map, naturally):
- purchaseable minions added to spawns just a single time
- permanently upgradeable minions
- asymmetrical objectives for the two teams (including, accordingly, assymetrical maps), for example with one team having to kill the nexus, the other just to prevent that from happening for a preset time.