League Classic Review: A misremembered mess with some lessons to be learned

I set my runes, exactly as I remember. This costs me almost all my IP, and I’m missing half a page in my first go. Crucially, though, I make sure I have the single crit chance rune. This is important. While my crit chance is sub one percent, my memory is thrown back 16 years ago to the first time I played, and heard from friends that the game actually rounded up to 1% because it couldn’t handle fractions. There’s no way this was true, but in practice, 0.45% crit chance feels a lot more like 10%. Or to use some gamer math, it’s 50%: Either I crit, or I don’t.

I queue for a match and manage to get top after some negotiation in the lobby. This is decidedly un-nostalgic. Years of social engineering by Riot sociologists has turned most LoL pre-game lobbies into a kind of enforced prisoners dilemma, where no one gets the role they’re best at, but make decisions like “I need to play Jungle so I don’t get an awful jungler.” A player with “Vayne” in their name, doesn’t pick Vayne, and instead locks in Ezreal mid.

I’m picking Tryndamere. I’m doing this because I want to try something I’ve not done in maybe a decade. I’ve taken ignite and flash, and I’m going to crit cheese my opponent. After a loading screen that tries desperately to evoke some more nostalgia, I’m into the game and ready to execute.

I’m against a Cho’Gath. I hide in my bush and I wait. Cho’gath, suspiciously, decides to Rupture the exact spot in the bush I’m hiding in. He makes a mistake, he walks up and tries to do more damage to me. I hit him. First auto attack of the match. It crits. Cho’s health chunks by a quarter. I continue walking him down, hitting again, again, again. Five hits, two crits. 0.45% my ass. I tower dive him, hit ignite, and spin away. First blood.

This is the old tech. Methods learned in times past. And this is perhaps the exact moment that League Classic is trying to create. The flood of dopamine and pride. The satisfaction of executing a well-practiced maneuver. Or more accurately, a half-remembered trick.

The Uncanny Valley

The rest of the game is slow. Cho TPs back and we trade kills. I’m playing overly aggressive, but I’m ostensibly winning the lane. With flash and spin, ganks from pre 2014 junglers are basically completely harmless until level 6, and even then I’m Trydamere. Watching an Amumu walking into my lane, hit creeps with a bandage toss and whiff this ult is cathartic.

I briefly debate going AP Tryndamere, although I don’t even check to see if the AP scaling that made that work was even re-added. Instead I go for a bland-ish crit build. Static Shiv. Infinity Edge. The new shop, which I’ve never quite gotten used to, despite it being almost a decade since it was added, is the first thing that takes me out of this whole experience.

In fact there’s a lot of things that make this a little uncanny and awkward. The dulled down, perhaps deliberately uglified Summoners Rift where the colors aren’t quite right. The slightly not-quite as they were bush shapes and terrain features. Perhaps appropriately, this feels like a mid 2010’s creepypasta. “You load up your favorite game, but everything is just slightly wrong… spooky!”

But there’s a lot that’s more than just uncanny. It’s just plain wrong. The eras and time that all these various versions of Champions are pulled from are all over the place. The Season 3 jungle items. Heart of Gold support item but the Season 4 warding items. And the hero selection is arbitrary and confusing. Jarvan but no Caitlyn. Vayne but not Galio. There seems to be some philosophy behind this, a kind of mantra on what is ‘Nuevo League’ and what is ‘Le Classique.’

It’s clear the intention is to replicate a feeling or an era, rather than a specific patch. But League Classic doesn’t achieve that at all. Instead it misremembers, it hallucinates. A dementia-ridden recollection of League of Legends. The kind of thing that makes the details-sicko anorak buried deep inside of me want to blurt out “Actually!” and start detailing missing features and anachronisms.

Part of this feels like deliberate sabotage. I don’t think the people making League Classic went into this trying to make it underwhelming and wrong. But I think they very likely had a lot of external pressures to not make a rival product to the mainline LoL product. A lot of voices saying stupid things like “players will want to use their modern skins!” and “Make sure to monetize the Classic skins!” Some of this thankfully didn’t make it into the full release, but it’s clearly there.

We win the game. I split push with Tryndamere while the rest of the team fight in positions that don’t really make sense. The enemy Vayne gets a Quadra Kill but can’t make it to top lane in time to secure the Penta. I’m already at the inhibitor. I don’t want to say I singlehandedly won this game, but it’s damn close.

As the victory screen appears, I try to remember a time in recent memory, in modern League, where I’ve had the same experience. The satisfaction of execution. The feeling of carrying. And in that thought I realise what’s actually appealing about all this, to me, and at least a good portion of those playing it.

Players don’t miss the old graphics, the items, the balance. They miss their champion being a bit overpowered, and having a win condition for that champion that doesn’t involve four other players being perfectly aligned. In League Classic, five item Vayne 1v5’s. Blue Ezreal is uncatchable. Trynd top solos. Cho’gath is unkillable. Gang Plank can’t die. Katarina players mash buttons and get Penta kills. Sion doesn’t make sense. These are wonderful, fun ways of playing the game that are patched and reworked out of existence in the current game.

If there’s one thing that can hopefully be taken away from the game, it’s that. The idea that the fun of many of these characters came from their slightly broken state. We still get that occasionally. When a new Champion releases and they're wrecking face. But more often than not that comes with the kind of annoyance for those who don't get to play them. I mean, when's the last time in modern League where 10 "fun" Champions have been in a game together?