Don't Count On Getting Third-Party Skins In League Of Legends

Collaboration events are a pretty big thing in video games these days, particularly free-to-play live service games. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not always the best thing either. It basically comes down to one of two things. Either the collab needs to be done in a way so that it fits the universe – this, I think, mostly matters more when dealing with lore-heavy games, or it needs to be a game that’s just built with collaborations.

Fortnite is a solid example of the latter. It may not have been originally designed with constant collabs in mind, but that’s definitely something it’s known for now. And, to be fair, they’ve found a way to make it fit what lore they have, which is why they’ve brought in the TARDIS from Doctor Who and two of the Stellaron Hunters from Honkai: Star Rail.

That brings us to an example for the other type of game… the lore-heavy ones. The Honkai-verse is very story-focused, and a lot of time has been spent on world-building. Yet we do have some in-game crossovers. One just kind of brought Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn to Genshin Impact. While I’m sure that was great for fans of Aloy, it kind of just felt weird. So, despite being a free five-star character, she sits untouched in my roster.

Then there’s the Fate Stay/night crossover in Honkai: Star Rail. This feels a bit more natural than the Genshin one, partially because Teyvat is a world more or less closed off to the outside, while the universe of Star Rail is open enough that Elio keeps sending Blade on sidequests in other universes. It also helped that the Fate collab, which brought us two playable characters, included a story quest that tied them to the Honkai-verse. It’s an objectively better system, although feelings on the story itself may vary.

One game company avoids all the problems related to this in the simplest way possible. Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends and Valorant, just skips doing collabs altogether. Even third-party skins are avoided.

Recently, the lead designer of League of Legends, August Browning, addressed this on a stream when answering player questions, when someone asked about third-party skins. The stream was clipped by HeWhoQuacksss and shared on YouTube, and then was subsequently shared in an article by Mollie Taylor on PC Gamer.

According to Browning, Riot isn’t big on the idea of collaborations. He told the viewer that the company has been “pretty not open to that”. If you’re wondering why, it’s pretty simple: they feel that throwing in things like third-party skins “completely changes” the tone of the game.

It’s not an incorrect sentiment. In fact, the One Punch Man collab was one of the reasons I bailed on Crystal of Atlan. It just felt weird. Really, it just comes down to what the developers are trying to achieve with their game. If we’re talking about Fortnite, I don’t think it’s a problem. Even Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming Evangelion raid, which Taylor mentioned in her post, has the potential to be a great experience without having a negative effect on the general vibe of XIV. After all, Final Fantasy was doing collabs before anyone had even thought up Fortnite. They made a pretty solid run of games out of that with Kingdom Hearts. The Nier raids in XIV were pretty good too.