League of Legends Origins

I'm a Dota player and have never played LoL but I found this show to be very entertaining. It basically puts gamers in a good light and for those who don't game, it really does inform the viewer on the appeals of online gaming and that E sports is here to stay.

I've been playing League for 4 years now and it is by far the game that takes up most of my time. So going in to this it was really interesting to learn all about how the game was fully created and formed. However if you aren't really interested in league or video games in general then this probably won't do a lot for you.

I generally really like video game documentaries. However the documentary part of this is really lacking. Theres like a 5-10 minute blip about the creation of the game, but after that it just ends up talking about the esports/community aspects. Which, I still find interesting, but I would have much preferred a more in-depth look into how league was made. They never really talked about balancing, or the challenges of making certain champions or even the gameplay itself. Instead they focus on the rise of the league esport, the celebration of its fans, and how it can bring people together. Much more time on how the game actually was made and challenges of the game itself would make this documentary way better. Great credits music though.

I didn't expect much from it, knowing how Riot handles PR, but this seriously? This is far from a documentary, this a blatant infomercial. They actually could have easily avoided that, by completely leaving out the villainous back story, but sugarcoating it like this? Portraying the Backstory like this, completely ignoring Pendragon and the DotA Allstars incident, is truly hypocritic.

From the "documentary" you can easily get the impression, that riot popped into existence and spent 6 months developing their Champions and designing their kits. Yeah that impression is unfortunately incorrect. Riot got founded and not much later the DotA Allstars Forum disappeared, without notice. Central hub for all things concerning Dota, hero design, balance discussions, ideas for the game, everything. Guess what happened? Those Dota loving Kids hired Pendragon and with him bought all Ressources concerning DotA, since he as the websites Host, had full control over the Server running it. And suddenly not only do we recognize familiar designs in LOL, we also find implementations of the Communities design ideas from the forum, lots of it. Teemo from the movie? Yeah that guy is an immigrant to runeterra, rammus wasn't even changed in the slightest from the forums design.

Nobody could sue anyone, since Pendragon owned the domain and Blizzard owns all designs by the Warcraft 3 Modding License Agreement.

The esports part is actually interesting, this feud has been dying down over the past decade and this was the chance to make ammends with the (now in Dota 2) still active Community from back past. But riot decided on a dishonest infomercial.

I started playing LoL in season 2, so a lot of this stuff is just nostalgia for me. but it has some interesting things about it that even i didnt know. so for me it was a very mild documentary, that didnt really spark much intigue.

6/10: good but not really something to remember