I’m Steve Singer, Senior Vice President of Publisher and Developer Relations at Nintendo of America.
And I’m Ariko Kimoto, Director of Partner Management at Nintendo of America, on behalf of Nintendo and our friends at Riot Games.
It’s our pleasure to introduce this presentation from Riot Forge.
As many of you know, the League of Legends universe is both vast and varied, with so many stories to tell.
Today, we’re delighted to share a closer look at several of those stories, which will be coming soon to the Nintendo Switch system, including Hextech Mayhem, a League of Legends story which launches later today.
And of course, there will be world first reveals to enjoy here, too.
We’re excited for players to venture into the world of Runeterra on their Nintendo Switch systems, and this is just the beginning.
Indie developers from around the world are collaborating with Riot Forge to bring a wealth of innovative experiences to life.
We can’t wait to share the visions of these talented creators with all of you, so let’s get to it.
Thanks, Steve.
Appreciate the kind words.
And hi, everyone.
Welcome to our show.
My name is Leanne I’m the head of Riot Forge.
And I’m Rowan I’m the creative director of Riot Forge.
Riot Forge is Riot Games’s 3rd Party publishing division.
We’ve been working on Riot Forge for a few years now and we get to work with some awesome partners from all around the world, and these partners are really focused on building completable League of Legends Games It’s all about stories.
We want to tell really great stories in these games, and that’s why we’re super excited to be partnering with Nintendo.
The Switch is the perfect platform for these games.
We’ve created this deep universe for eleven or so years.
There’s over 150 epic champions in League of Legends.
Riot Forge games are going to let you get up close and personal with our champions like never before.
League of Legends has never had storytelling in games like this before until now.
Yeah, and our developers are working on some awesome stories with some of our favorite champions.
So we’re extremely excited to share that with you today, and I think we should get the show started.
Let’s do it.
Let’s do it.
Let’s go.
At Tequila Works we always try to create games that try to answer two questions: Where is the beautiful? And where is the crazy? The world of Runeterra is populated by hundreds of mighty heroes But as a creator, I was always more interested in the wrinkles And the wrinkles have those little tiny details that define all humanity And there is this tiny little child Nunu I’m Nunu In this world of war, he’s just looking for his mother And that was the kind of story we want to tell.
Song of Nunu is a single player narrative adventure And as Nunu you are looking for your mother It’s a road trip you are doing with your best friend Willump is like the biggest teddy bear you have ever seen He’s like a father or protector to Nunu And with Willump you move through the Freljord This frozen land The Freljord is an inhospitable, unforgiving wasteland But, in this land You look here You have the Notai The Notai don’t believe in war, they believe in stories As the Notai say You cannot kill a story, and you cannot kill a song Nunu is a Notai boy and he has a magical flute He can make different elements in the environment react to its notes and its sounds Solving the different challenges we encounter in the game.
If you play the flute and it’s a melody he likes He will dance with you But, if you start making bad noises He closes his ear and complaining like “stop that” And if you don’t stop then he throws a snowball at you We put so much care into the relationship between Nunu and Willump They play together, they laugh together They cry together They take care of each other The Freljord is a magical environment And this game is all about adventure Players are going to be able to explore new and exciting places They have never seen before You will jump, you will climb, you will ride Yetis And the good thing about kid riding a yeti Is that no matter how hard the environment Everything feels like a roller coaster What are you do.
.
.
ahhhhhhh Waaaaaaaaa This is a story about the friendship between Two very different beings And how they grow to love each other This is a game about friendship Pure innocent joy Hope And family Thanks Willump I couldn’t do it without you buddy So this “rhythm game” induces a flow state, a state of heightened mental flexibility that allows the subject, to, uh, to master… the tempo.
.
.
BORING! Nobody’s going to play our game if you make it sound like homework.
Time to give Piltover a show they’ll never forget! Hmmm? No.
Not quite.
When Riot Forge approached us, they said “what champions would you be interested in?” Immediately, Ziggs stood out as this unhinged, wacky little puff ball of mayhem Heimerdinger is sort of this archetype of the old “you can’t do that” kind of character.
“WHAT?” And you put someone that doesn’t care about essentially anything, who will blow everything up.
With someone who says “you can’t do that” “And I won’t let you build this bomb!” And it’s just magic “It’s good to be back!” In Hextech Mayhem, you play as Ziggs and the idea is that you are causing as much mayhem as possible Go forth my beautiful bomb! Go forth and explode to your heart’s content! Hextech Mayhem was insprired by basically a mashup of autorhythm runners that we’ve had in the past and like a Guitar Hero or a Rock Band gameplay mashed together I wouldn’t want to say that Hextech Mayhem is a rhythm game it is a music game.
What that means is all of your inputs are explicitly tied to the music that includes the rhythm, that includes the melody, that includes the bridges, the verses and all of that.
So you are playing along explicitly to the music.
The music really drives the gameplay.
So when I’m playing, I just get a smile on my face.
and it’s like this music is just so happy and fun and i’m bouncing around to it.
but there are multiple levels of gameplay in this game that we have never done in the past.
There’s what we call the freestyle mayhem system, so there’s all the prompts and if you play them you do it right.
But then there’s also hidden prompts that are not visible, they’re all musical.
So if you are listening to music and you’re at tune to it.
You can cause tons of extra mayhem for extra bonus points and ranks and you know that’s the only way you can achieve the challenger.
“Now can we stop this buffoonery already?” “But there is so much room for improvement Heimerdinger.
I’m only getting started!” Our flavor really comes out through a lot of the frantic nature of the gameplay, the animations and the artistic representation of these champions that we hope is going to look fresh to League players but also familiar.
Hextech Mayhem really is for both the casual player who just wants to play a single player League of Legends story but also the mastery player who wants to dominate whatever game they play.
“I am unstoppable!!” “This is preposterous Ziggs!” “I know!! Isn’t it the best?” We’ve been pretty radio silent for at least a year or two.
You may remember us from the Game Awards where we showed a little teaser.
And let me tell you, the game has evolved considerably since that day.
Oh, look! It’s our favorite sniveling blivet.
We’ve been waiting ages to beat you up! Oh, yeah? Well, no time like the present.
CONV/RGENCE is a story about Ekko and Zaun, this polluted city in Runeterra.
Ekko uncovers this plot by a group of Chem-Barons, the organized crime of Zaun.
It’s a time travel story where he needs to save his city.
A few years back, we got a phone call from Riot Forge.
My partner called me up and said, “Hey, Riot wants to make a game with us.
” And my second child was just born.
He called me- I was literally at the hospital and I thought he was just messing with me.
So I was like, “I think it’s a prank caller, Dan.
I don’t think this is real.
” It turns out it was.
And we were pretty happy about that.
Double Stallion games typically have a lot of combat and have a beautiful 2D art style.
And Speed Brawl is our latest game.
Riot essentially told us: “We have a bunch of champions.
Which one do you want to work with?” And we settled on Ekko, we settled on Zaun.
Speed Brawl is a lot about focusing on the combat.
But in CONV/RGENCE, you’re exploring, you’re discovering.
We focused way more on the action platforming part of it.
We go deep into who Ekko is, developing his character and his story.
CONV/RGENCE is set in Zaun, but it’s Zaun through Ekko’s eyes.
Ekko is a teenage inventor and he has created this incredible device called the Zero Drive, which allows him to rewind time.
One major challenge was to make rewind feel more than just an undo button.
It’s about if you have information from the future, how can you make that useful? So you can actually mess up, go back in time, change your attack, and then go back and outsmart your enemy.
There’s definitely been a few games that have played with time control.
But what’s unique about CONV/RGENCE is that you can control every moment.
You essentially have a character that doesn’t make mistakes Any time he does something that he wants to fix, he just has to rewind it.
CONV/RGENCE was built to allow you to control time, to really strategize, because that’s what being Ekko is all about.
My name’s Ekko! Oh yeah.
.
.
I can rewind time.
Alright people listen up.
We’ve got a Harrowing to stop.
And remember, from here on out, it’s Captain Fortune.
The goddess granted me a vision.
The black mist enveloping the world.
If the black mist has returned I will drive it back.
I’m not losing my city to the delusions of some second rate king.
The dark comes to swallow everything.
With our combined might no challenge is too great.
I won’t abandon my duty, not again.
It’s time for the truth to come to light.
The one you seek, he stirs the mist.
Maybe we are doomed.
Has the goddess forsaken us? Come on we’ve taken some hits, but we’re not done yet.
I’m the CEO and Creative Director at Airship Ruined King is a RPG with turn-based combat “Knock them down!” And you play a group of champions that are from all parts of the world They converge in Bilgewater which is this town of like traitors and rogues and thieves Some live there and some are just transient And visiting for who-knows-what purposes “Hear that? Something just moved out there!” The player’s goal is to stop whatever oncoming threat is happening.
And it’s the rebirth of the Ruined King It’s a story largely about Miss Fortune and Illaoi and These are characters with kind of a strained history You know they’re sometimes friends sometimes foes or having to work together.
“Illaoi.
It’s been a while.
I was starting to think you were avoiding me.
” You throw in a guy like Braum who just bringing positivity to every scene “This will be fun yes?” Yasuo and Ahri who you know they’re kind of dealing with ghosts of their past And they’re kind of bonding over that “Ahri?” But they have a lot of secrets “I need to control myself” And then you have Pyke, who’s just crazy We wanted to make sure each combat was challenging We don’t want you to just mindlessly hit one attack and then Oh, now it’s a boss.
I’m gonna use strategy So lots of the creatures have unique mechanics We added a lane system where you can actually modify the speed of your abilities, And also modify the powers.
That will let you do things like I would need to heal before my character dies and I see the enemy’s doing an attack I can perform an ability in the speed lane and get the heal off in time Or I got a bunch of buffs built up on Yasuo And I’m going to do his big attack in the power lane It’s going to be slower, but it’s going to multiply all of those buffs even more.
It just adds a third dimension to the combat no other game I’ve seen has Combat is separate from the exploration aspect This division of combat and exploration allows us to really put forward the artistry of the team by highlighting the design of the characters, the animation, the visual effects We’ve basically taken what’s worked in our previous couple games and refined it I think we’ve taken Battle Chasers and cranked it up a notch So I think this game is uniquely “Airship” because of that marriage between really fun, kinda grounded in tradition roleplaying mechanics but brought into the modern era with this great visual wrapper Because of my background in comics, I approach everything as sort of like What is the comic book version of this character or this scene “This can’t be happening” Everyone from roleplaying fans to people who are adjacent are going to get something out of this game It’s not just for League of Legends players It’s a story that anyone can jump into and understand You know digesting the beauty of the world to really grinding your gears and trying to figure out the strategies and tactics to get through hard and difficult battles to the League fans who have always wanted to a step away from the competitive game “What the-” And just live in the world
It’s our pleasure to introduce this presentation from Riot Forge
Hi, everyone.
I’m Steve Singer, Senior Vice President of Publisher and Developer Relations at Nintendo of America.
And I’m Ariko Kimoto, Director of Partner Management at Nintendo of America, on behalf of Nintendo and our friends at Riot Games.
It’s our pleasure to introduce this presentation from Riot Forge.
As many of you know, the League of Legends universe is both vast and varied, with so many stories to tell.
Today, we’re delighted to share a closer look at several of those stories, which will be coming soon to the Nintendo Switch system, including Hextech Mayhem, a League of Legends story which launches later today.
And of course, there will be world first reveals to enjoy here, too.
We’re excited for players to venture into the world of Runeterra on their Nintendo Switch systems, and this is just the beginning.
Indie developers from around the world are collaborating with Riot Forge to bring a wealth of innovative experiences to life.
We can’t wait to share the visions of these talented creators with all of you, so let’s get to it.
Thanks, Steve.
Appreciate the kind words.
And hi, everyone.
Welcome to our show.
My name is Leanne I’m the head of Riot Forge.
And I’m Rowan I’m the creative director of Riot Forge.
Riot Forge is Riot Games’s 3rd Party publishing division.
We’ve been working on Riot Forge for a few years now and we get to work with some awesome partners from all around the world, and these partners are really focused on building completable League of Legends Games It’s all about stories.
We want to tell really great stories in these games, and that’s why we’re super excited to be partnering with Nintendo.
The Switch is the perfect platform for these games.
We’ve created this deep universe for eleven or so years.
There’s over 150 epic champions in League of Legends.
Riot Forge games are going to let you get up close and personal with our champions like never before.
League of Legends has never had storytelling in games like this before until now.
Yeah, and our developers are working on some awesome stories with some of our favorite champions.
So we’re extremely excited to share that with you today, and I think we should get the show started.
Let’s do it.
Let’s do it.
Let’s go.
At Tequila Works we always try to create games that try to answer two questions: Where is the beautiful? And where is the crazy? The world of Runeterra is populated by hundreds of mighty heroes But as a creator, I was always more interested in the wrinkles And the wrinkles have those little tiny details that define all humanity And there is this tiny little child Nunu I’m Nunu In this world of war, he’s just looking for his mother And that was the kind of story we want to tell.
Song of Nunu is a single player narrative adventure And as Nunu you are looking for your mother It’s a road trip you are doing with your best friend Willump is like the biggest teddy bear you have ever seen He’s like a father or protector to Nunu And with Willump you move through the Freljord This frozen land The Freljord is an inhospitable, unforgiving wasteland But, in this land You look here You have the Notai The Notai don’t believe in war, they believe in stories As the Notai say You cannot kill a story, and you cannot kill a song Nunu is a Notai boy and he has a magical flute He can make different elements in the environment react to its notes and its sounds Solving the different challenges we encounter in the game.
If you play the flute and it’s a melody he likes He will dance with you But, if you start making bad noises He closes his ear and complaining like “stop that” And if you don’t stop then he throws a snowball at you We put so much care into the relationship between Nunu and Willump They play together, they laugh together They cry together They take care of each other The Freljord is a magical environment And this game is all about adventure Players are going to be able to explore new and exciting places They have never seen before You will jump, you will climb, you will ride Yetis And the good thing about kid riding a yeti Is that no matter how hard the environment Everything feels like a roller coaster What are you do.
.
.
ahhhhhhh Waaaaaaaaa This is a story about the friendship between Two very different beings And how they grow to love each other This is a game about friendship Pure innocent joy Hope And family Thanks Willump I couldn’t do it without you buddy So this “rhythm game” induces a flow state, a state of heightened mental flexibility that allows the subject, to, uh, to master… the tempo.
.
.
BORING! Nobody’s going to play our game if you make it sound like homework.
Time to give Piltover a show they’ll never forget! Hmmm? No.
Not quite.
When Riot Forge approached us, they said “what champions would you be interested in?” Immediately, Ziggs stood out as this unhinged, wacky little puff ball of mayhem Heimerdinger is sort of this archetype of the old “you can’t do that” kind of character.
“WHAT?” And you put someone that doesn’t care about essentially anything, who will blow everything up.
With someone who says “you can’t do that” “And I won’t let you build this bomb!” And it’s just magic “It’s good to be back!” In Hextech Mayhem, you play as Ziggs and the idea is that you are causing as much mayhem as possible Go forth my beautiful bomb! Go forth and explode to your heart’s content! Hextech Mayhem was insprired by basically a mashup of autorhythm runners that we’ve had in the past and like a Guitar Hero or a Rock Band gameplay mashed together I wouldn’t want to say that Hextech Mayhem is a rhythm game it is a music game.
What that means is all of your inputs are explicitly tied to the music that includes the rhythm, that includes the melody, that includes the bridges, the verses and all of that.
So you are playing along explicitly to the music.
The music really drives the gameplay.
So when I’m playing, I just get a smile on my face.
and it’s like this music is just so happy and fun and i’m bouncing around to it.
but there are multiple levels of gameplay in this game that we have never done in the past.
There’s what we call the freestyle mayhem system, so there’s all the prompts and if you play them you do it right.
But then there’s also hidden prompts that are not visible, they’re all musical.
So if you are listening to music and you’re at tune to it.
You can cause tons of extra mayhem for extra bonus points and ranks and you know that’s the only way you can achieve the challenger.
“Now can we stop this buffoonery already?” “But there is so much room for improvement Heimerdinger.
I’m only getting started!” Our flavor really comes out through a lot of the frantic nature of the gameplay, the animations and the artistic representation of these champions that we hope is going to look fresh to League players but also familiar.
Hextech Mayhem really is for both the casual player who just wants to play a single player League of Legends story but also the mastery player who wants to dominate whatever game they play.
“I am unstoppable!!” “This is preposterous Ziggs!” “I know!! Isn’t it the best?” We’ve been pretty radio silent for at least a year or two.
You may remember us from the Game Awards where we showed a little teaser.
And let me tell you, the game has evolved considerably since that day.
Oh, look! It’s our favorite sniveling blivet.
We’ve been waiting ages to beat you up! Oh, yeah? Well, no time like the present.
CONV/RGENCE is a story about Ekko and Zaun, this polluted city in Runeterra.
Ekko uncovers this plot by a group of Chem-Barons, the organized crime of Zaun.
It’s a time travel story where he needs to save his city.
A few years back, we got a phone call from Riot Forge.
My partner called me up and said, “Hey, Riot wants to make a game with us.
” And my second child was just born.
He called me- I was literally at the hospital and I thought he was just messing with me.
So I was like, “I think it’s a prank caller, Dan.
I don’t think this is real.
” It turns out it was.
And we were pretty happy about that.
Double Stallion games typically have a lot of combat and have a beautiful 2D art style.
And Speed Brawl is our latest game.
Riot essentially told us: “We have a bunch of champions.
Which one do you want to work with?” And we settled on Ekko, we settled on Zaun.
Speed Brawl is a lot about focusing on the combat.
But in CONV/RGENCE, you’re exploring, you’re discovering.
We focused way more on the action platforming part of it.
We go deep into who Ekko is, developing his character and his story.
CONV/RGENCE is set in Zaun, but it’s Zaun through Ekko’s eyes.
Ekko is a teenage inventor and he has created this incredible device called the Zero Drive, which allows him to rewind time.
One major challenge was to make rewind feel more than just an undo button.
It’s about if you have information from the future, how can you make that useful? So you can actually mess up, go back in time, change your attack, and then go back and outsmart your enemy.
There’s definitely been a few games that have played with time control.
But what’s unique about CONV/RGENCE is that you can control every moment.
You essentially have a character that doesn’t make mistakes Any time he does something that he wants to fix, he just has to rewind it.
CONV/RGENCE was built to allow you to control time, to really strategize, because that’s what being Ekko is all about.
My name’s Ekko! Oh yeah.
.
.
I can rewind time.
Alright people listen up.
We’ve got a Harrowing to stop.
And remember, from here on out, it’s Captain Fortune.
The goddess granted me a vision.
The black mist enveloping the world.
If the black mist has returned I will drive it back.
I’m not losing my city to the delusions of some second rate king.
The dark comes to swallow everything.
With our combined might no challenge is too great.
I won’t abandon my duty, not again.
It’s time for the truth to come to light.
The one you seek, he stirs the mist.
Maybe we are doomed.
Has the goddess forsaken us? Come on we’ve taken some hits, but we’re not done yet.
There is only one Queen.
MY QUEEN! I’m Joe Madureira.
I’m the CEO and Creative Director at Airship Ruined King is a RPG with turn-based combat “Knock them down!” And you play a group of champions that are from all parts of the world They converge in Bilgewater which is this town of like traitors and rogues and thieves Some live there and some are just transient And visiting for who-knows-what purposes “Hear that? Something just moved out there!” The player’s goal is to stop whatever oncoming threat is happening.
And it’s the rebirth of the Ruined King It’s a story largely about Miss Fortune and Illaoi and These are characters with kind of a strained history You know they’re sometimes friends sometimes foes or having to work together.
“Illaoi.
It’s been a while.
I was starting to think you were avoiding me.
” You throw in a guy like Braum who just bringing positivity to every scene “This will be fun yes?” Yasuo and Ahri who you know they’re kind of dealing with ghosts of their past And they’re kind of bonding over that “Ahri?” But they have a lot of secrets “I need to control myself” And then you have Pyke, who’s just crazy We wanted to make sure each combat was challenging We don’t want you to just mindlessly hit one attack and then Oh, now it’s a boss.
I’m gonna use strategy So lots of the creatures have unique mechanics We added a lane system where you can actually modify the speed of your abilities, And also modify the powers.
That will let you do things like I would need to heal before my character dies and I see the enemy’s doing an attack I can perform an ability in the speed lane and get the heal off in time Or I got a bunch of buffs built up on Yasuo And I’m going to do his big attack in the power lane It’s going to be slower, but it’s going to multiply all of those buffs even more.
It just adds a third dimension to the combat no other game I’ve seen has Combat is separate from the exploration aspect This division of combat and exploration allows us to really put forward the artistry of the team by highlighting the design of the characters, the animation, the visual effects We’ve basically taken what’s worked in our previous couple games and refined it I think we’ve taken Battle Chasers and cranked it up a notch So I think this game is uniquely “Airship” because of that marriage between really fun, kinda grounded in tradition roleplaying mechanics but brought into the modern era with this great visual wrapper Because of my background in comics, I approach everything as sort of like What is the comic book version of this character or this scene “This can’t be happening” Everyone from roleplaying fans to people who are adjacent are going to get something out of this game It’s not just for League of Legends players It’s a story that anyone can jump into and understand You know digesting the beauty of the world to really grinding your gears and trying to figure out the strategies and tactics to get through hard and difficult battles to the League fans who have always wanted to a step away from the competitive game “What the-” And just live in the world
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