After Udyr and soon Aurelion Sol, another League of Legends champion will receive a complete overhaul. This is Skarner, the Crystal Keeper.
As a reminder, the champion revamp was put to a community vote earlier this year. Players had the option of choosing between 5 champions: Tryndamere, Shyvana, Nocturne, Kog'Maw, and Skarner — and the latter won. The champion is already over 10 years old since he appeared in Summoner's Rift in August 2011 . It will therefore benefit from the highest level of redesign from the studio: an MVG, visual and gameplay update (or MGU in English which aims to change everything in the champion to make it almost new).
Even if the studio has not yet got down to work, it wanted to share with us new concepts created by a member of the community.
Early fan concepts
The developers will explore several avenues to find what best suits our old crystal guardian and give it a facelift. The concepts shown above were proposed by Skarner fan Larry “ BravoRay ” Ray and are described as follows:
- The first two rows are attempts to keep Skarner nearly identical, while making him a little more unique to the League of Legends roster by adding some fancy elements to stand out from the classic scorpion structure.
- The third row considers avenues to totally reinvent the Brackerns. They imagine them as the protectors of an ancient Shuriman civilization before it disappeared into the sands. Thus, the Brackerns would be assemblies of crystals containing thousands of souls of elite warriors.
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The final row explores a version of Skarner that extends his current story. We haven't developed it yet, but in this model he is captured by Piltover and experimented on to create a controllable Hextech Guardian. Nevertheless he regains his memories, escapes from Piltover, and yearns to destroy the city for what it has inflicted on his fellow men and himself. To help it, it now has nice Hextech optimizations. Piltover will soon receive his own change, and the bill is likely to be very high.
Suffice to say that the proposed third version looks very attractive on paper. Not only does the design show a more terrifying champion, but the lore surrounding it is very interesting. It would add a lot of depth to the champion and allow him to better anchor himself in the history of Runeterra.
Nothing says that Riot Games will be inspired by these concepts which we must admit are rather successful – but the studio would like to point out that nothing had been decided yet . When Riot officially begins work on Skarner, it will share a larger /dev blog with much more information on the game design and story aspects.
The total overhauls taking excessively long, it is possible that we will have to wait until early 2023 to finally see the Crystal Guardian 2.0.
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