Sentinels of Light Event Takeaways & Future Events

The Sentinels of Light event was a bit of a hot mess was it not? The stories were all over the place, champions were mischaracterized and the lore was inconsistent as well. So, now Riot has taken the criticism and told fans what they’ve learned from it.

What can we expect from future League of Legends events? What will Riot change after the misstep that was the Sentinels of Light event? Let’s check it out.

The Visual Novel

The Sentinels of Light event relied heavily on the visual novel, but by having to unlock chapters and including the ‘ragtag team of assembled Sentinels’ we didn’t get to experience the whole story – hell we didn’t even get to experience all the Sentinels if we’re honest.

What was Swain doing while the Ruination was taking place? Where were other world leaders throughout this event? None of those aspects of the story couldn’t be explored due to the dialog-heavy visual novel.

Therefore, Riot 84Slashes and Reav3 have explained that in the future visual novels will merely accompany events and add more color to the story, but not be the main focal point of it all.

Keeping Lore Gated Behind Gameplay

Throughout the Sentinels of Light event, players had to play much more than they usually would – if you’re a casual player – and therefore not everyone could unlock the event story – like me who was on vacation enjoying the beaches of Italy at the time.

So, what has Riot learned from this? That lore shouldn’t be hidden behind gameplay. Some people really love the lore and story of Runeterra, but don’t enjoy playing that much League of Legends – this has probably increased with the success of Arcane.

Therefore, lore will be accessible in the future during events even without having to spend ones whole summer vacation in Italy playing games instead.

Inconsistent Story Telling

League of Legends was once a single game. No fancy Netflix shows, no mobile games or auto-battlers. Those were simpler times where a story was only told through one medium - League of Legends itself.

With the growth of League of Legends and Riot Games narrative also grew and instead of having one medium, the Sentinels of Light story was told through four with four different teams all bending the characters a little to fit into their narrative box.

This ended up creating some mismatches in the story, as well as some mischaracterization for some champions as well.

Our takeaway is that simultaneous forms of storytelling that support the same lore moments need to be consistent, rather than optimized for individual products.

So, in the future Riot will likely work on communicating and keeping the stories consistent. Oh, and if you’re still confused about the core story of the event, make sure to check it out on the official Riot Games channel.

Are Lore Events Dead?

Not by a long shot. In the post by Reav3 and 84Slashes, they explicitly state that even though this event didn’t go 100% according to plan, the immense amounts of feedback they got showed them that the community cares for these characters and would want more events based around lore in Runeterra.

So, if you love lore and events, you can look forward to more large-scale events. Now that Sentinels of Light has passed the developers have learned a lot and hopefully, the next larger event will be better. The Arcane x Riot event was also huge and went off without a hitch, so it’s clear that Riot is able to pull off insane events without many problems.