LoL dev reveals scrapped ultimate that rewinded the entire match

A League of Legends developer has revealed a scrapped ultimate for Ekko that used to rewind the entire match by 8 seconds.

League of Legends is filled to the brim with quirky and unique characters. From sad mummy boys all the way to literal demons inside of weapons, the game features a wide variety in its cast. Because of this, Riot tries its best to differentiate each character from the others in terms of gameplay, aesthetics, design, and more.

This has resulted in a colorful cast of characters, each with unique kits and abilities that players have fallen in love with. However, designing these champions takes plenty of time and work from the developers, with many champs going through several iterations before reaching the live servers.

Ekko, the boy who shattered Time was arguably one of the most ambitious champions created by Riot, with the capacity to warp time using his Z-Drive. The devs were so ambitious that a previous ultimate of Ekko rewinded the entire match by 8 seconds, as revealed by Riot August.

Riot August explains scrapped Ekko ultimate that rewinded the entire map

August, a lead designer at Riot Games was the brains behind the creation of Ekko. As such, they were the ones who came up with the proposal of having Ekko turn back the entire match 8 seconds.

“One of the initial things I tried was rewinding the entire game. The way it worked was Ekko would hit his ultimate and throw the entire map into the timestream for 8 seconds. We grab all the relevant statistics about them, their health, their cooldowns, their position on the map and we’d save it.”

“8 seconds later, we’d rewind back to their original state. The only thing you couldn’t rewind was death, which would cause some pretty cool things to happen. There’d be crazy team fights with everybody throwing their cooldowns out right at the start because they knew they’d get them back in 8 seconds and all they had to do was kill someone.”

While on paper the ultimate sounded like one of the biggest game changers ever introduced to League, it had some problems as August explained.

“It was very game-warping. On top of that, it threw the entire map into the timestream, so you’d have cases where like a guy is walking back to top lane and he sees that you the ult has been cast and he’s like ‘great in 8 seconds I’m going to be teleported backward and then I’m just gonna have to keep walking back to top lane’”.

After a threat to perma-ban Ekko from a QA tester, August scrapped the ultimate, leading us to the current version of Chronobreak today.