LoL devs reveal Ambessa’s gameplay design drew inspiration from another Arcane character

League of Legends has emerged out of a spectacular Worlds 2024 Finals weekend and Riot has moved predictably quickly into its next phase. As part of that, new champion Ambessa is set to release on November 6, and the lead developer has confirmed part of the inspiration comes from another Arcane character.

At this year’s Worlds, Lead Gameplay Designer Matt Leung-Harrison spoke to Dexerto about the new champion, and how the development team drew on the game’s existing pantheon to design Ambessa’s toolkit.

“Ambessa is very similar to Vi or Riven. She has the input paradigm of Riven, but she’s more of a Vi type of character. She’s okay with scrapping with the frontline. She has an Ultimate that can go deep into a fight,” Leung-Harrison said.

Vi was first added to League of Legends all the way back in 2012. She is also featured as one of the lead characters in Arcane alongside Ambessa, and her inclusion among the inspirations for the new champion is a thematic touchstone, as well as a mechanical one in-game.

Netflix: Arcane

Despite that solid foundational design, the development team has continued to iterate on the character extensively, as Leung-Harrison explains.

“One of the changes that we made late in development, even after she hit PBE, was that we increased her Q cooldown to 10 seconds. We did that because she was having too much uptime on her dashing and I think players just found that initially pretty confusing and what she’s doing was not readable.

“We decided, ‘okay, let’s make her do a rotation and then get out rather than just have her permanently dashing.”

The developer went on to detail exactly what players can expect from Ambessa when playing as or against her when the new patch drops. This includes her status in a relatively underpopulated niche between full melee and ranged champions.

“In terms of her place in the game, she’s more of a mid-range fighter, which is not really something that we’ve experimented with very much. She’s got her chains and that’s a very fun pattern to land, but it also can be a pretty frustrating pattern if a champion is playing outside of your range all the time,” he said.

“I would say in that sense it’s similar to Urgot, where she’s a top lane semi-ranged character that sometimes has to get into melee-ranged combat. We’re trying to land that in-and-out flighty pattern, similar to Riven, and Urgot.”

Riot Games

Ambessa is the first playable League of Legends champion who debuted in the lore via Netflix series Arcane. The character is a mighty warrior who wields two large chain weapons and should predominantly see use in the Top Lane, though Mid also looks viable at this stage.

The new champion is set to arrive on November 6, along with the 14.22 update and a host of buffs and nerfs to the existing roster.