Hello gamers! We’re here to talk about our next new mode coming in patch 25.21, ARAM: Mayhem!
ARAM has always been a mainstay for League, whether as the mode you queue up for when you’re chilling with friends, or as the main way you play League, and this year we’ve been looking for ways to shake up the mode you already love while still keeping its unique identity. In Season 2, we made some major updates to the mode with new maps and a new reroll system in the form of Champion Cards, alongside more champion-specific balancing options to make the mode just feel better. And now, we feel it’s time to rock this bridge… with some augments!
In this blog we’ll cover more about how we brought the Mayhem to ARAM, and what you can expect when you dive into the mode.
Augmenting ARAM aka AARAM?
In ARAM: Mayhem, you will get four to five augments that supercharge your champion’s gameplay; you can become an unkillable tank Sona or zip down the bridge as a high-speed Mordekaiser. If you’ve played Arena or TFT, you should be familiar with how augments work, but for those that haven’t, they provide powerful buffs that are way bigger and wackier than power spikes granted through ability rank ups or items in traditional ARAM. What we’re aiming for is more than just chaos–it’s about unlocking new, creative playstyles that still feel distinctly “ARAM.” To us, ARAM is that fantasy of 5v5 random champions clashing down one singular lane, so injecting Mayhem directly into your champions will still keep it feeling like ARAM, but with exciting, new, and crazy powers to play with.
At the start of each match, you’ll choose one of three augments to kick off your build. The next augments will be available at levels 7, 11, and 15. Just like items, you can claim augments on death (or for the “cheaters” out there, there might be a secret augment that lets you return to base, shop, and claim augments by backing).
Our inspiration for this mode came last year with Wild Rift’s AAA ARAM, a rotating mode where players would earn augments throughout an ARAM match. It introduced a fun, fast-paced way to experience some augments in a more relaxed 5v5 setting—and the response was overwhelmingly positive.
Around the same time, Arena was embarking on its extended run, with so many players diving into its punchy blend of deckbuilding and 2v2 combat. So that got us thinking: Can we combine the strategic depth of Arena with the sugar rush of Wild Rift’s AAA ARAM?
Over the course of two days, an engineer and a designer put together a simple prototype; take the Arena augments and simply smash them into ARAM (Engineer’s note: it was not THAT simple). To our surprise, the prototype was thrilling right out of the gate. The combination of fast-paced teamfights with high-impact augments felt fresh and, even in its roughest form, authentically ARAM.
Three Augments Walk onto a Bridge…
What started as a two-person experiment soon grew into a dedicated team that had hundreds of new augment ideas to put into this new mode. Some were clever, some were broken, and some were clearly cursed like I’m a Baby Kitty, Where is Mama?
We’re bringing in a lot of your favorite augments from Arena, but also over 40 brand-new ones. We’ve even made a few that could only function in a mode like ARAM: Mayhem, like King Me. Taking the transporter (Hexgate, Bloom Portal, Cannon) in the enemies’ base “Kings” you, granting bonuses! King Me asks, “Why did the chicken cross the Howling Abyss?” However the answer is very clear, the chicken wants rewards, an upgraded item, a prismatic augment, and most importantly, aura.
Or maybe you want to make the Snowball the core to your chaos? You might look to try out Biggest Snowball Ever to quadruple (quintuple?) the size of your Snowball and knock up enemies. Follow it up with Snowball Upgrade to deal AoE damage when you hit an enemy, Then, add Fetch to the mix, which lets you pick up allies’ Snowballs to refresh your own.
What if everyone could be Nunu? What if Nunu could become double Nunu? These are things to ponder.
…wait if you got Fetch then you could become Triple Nunu, or Quad Nunu… what horrors have we created?
That said, designing a mode like this comes with challenges, especially around gameplay clarity. Unlike Arena, where you’re usually tracking just one or two opponents, ARAM teamfights have 10, which means things can get pretty overwhelming. A handful of augments that we ported over from Arena had persistent effects, essentially things that are always on, which became very tiring to track and look out for. An example of this is the Arena augment Center of the Universe, where you would can have old Aurelian Sol stars orbiting around you,, iImagine that overlapping with everyone having some sort of ring or circle of effects, overlapping each other in one lane. It was just a constant Venn Diagram mess.
To address this, we started by evaluating all the augments that are available in Arena and just removing any effects that were “persistent” (always on). Modifying them would change the expectations from Arena and require players to learn two different versions functionally, which we didn’t want to do here. Where we could keep that same functionality though was auto casting augments, we just needed to tune down the frequency, but compensate by upping the impact. Functionally they’re still the same, but this allows them to really have a punch in ARAM teamfights. This allows us to ensure fights remain readable and fun, even in the middle of a fast-paced skirmish and keeps it still feeling like ARAM.
Source link
