Convergence: A League of Legends Story is the latest in a line of spinoffs that expand the franchise's universe, exploring the champion Ekko in the context of a single-player, 2D platformer. The title comes from Riot Forge, a publishing arm of Riot Games that collaborates with indie studios to create unique titles with established League of Legends characters. For Convergence Riot Forge worked with Double Stallion, which has previously produced titles like combat racer Speed Brawl.
Riot first announced its plans for story-based League of Legends games in 2019, a saga that began with the turn-based Ruined King in 2021. Each League of Legends Story release focuses on placing beloved characters into a different genre, with Convergence placing Ekko in the undercity of Zaun to explore his time rewinding powers in a new way. The linear platformer offers new ways for players to explore the true capabilities of Ekko's kit, as well as its limitations and how his control of time impacts his relationships with other characters.
Screen Rant sat down with Riot Forge's Creative Director Rowan Parker to discuss the creative process behind Convergence, collaborating with Double Stallion, and what it's like to explore League of Legends characters and narratives in new ways.
Screen Rant: Firstly, I'd love to hear about what made Ekko the right character for this project, and Zaun the right setting.
Rowan Parker: I’ll zoom out and just give a little bit of context on Riot Forge in general before I dive straight into explain, Ekko. I'm Rowan, I'm the Creative Director of Riot Forge. I'm also one of our game design directors at Riot. I've been at Riot a little over nine years, about nine and a half years. We started Forge in 2018. We're a third party publisher that works with external indie studios to make these boutique, storytelling, single player games in the world of League of Legends with our characters and our champions. So these are games which are the complete opposite of what Riot usually makes. Riot makes these big, 1000-hour, online competitive games, Forge we make the opposite of that; we make these bespoke, handcrafted story games which are completable and they're always single player, so there's a pause button that you can hit.
So in the case of something like Convergence, the way we arrive at the character to use sort of goes hand in hand with how we even begin to work with the studios. These are really, really collaborative processes when we work with the studio. We don't go to the studio with an RFP or an idea; we don't go to them and say, "Hey, can you please make this game for us?" It's a discussion when we first start about, "Hey, what matters to you guys as a studio for your culture? What kind of stories do you like telling? What kind of gameplay are they already experienced in?" So Double Stallion, who is the studio up in Montreal that made Convergence, they have a really rich history of really strong animation and 2D art, and they also have really good action platforming mechanics.
When they first came to us, actually, with the idea for Ekko, they really liked the time rewind mechanic that he has, and they wanted to explore and play with that. And so we started to circle around thematics, and settings, and the other cast of characters we could bring in, and it becomes this sort of wedding of gameplay, narrative, art, story, and it eventually leads to us settling on a character like Ekko.
Can you talk a little bit about what the creative process was like in exploring a new genre with this character? What was the most fun to experiment with in that regard?
Rowan Parker: So something Forge gets to have a lot of fun with is we get to showcase the true power level of our champions in our games. In a PvP MOBA game, you have to be balanced and fair for competitive integrity online. But in a single player game, we can do whatever we want, right? Some of the fun of taking characters like Ekko is thinking, "Okay, what would he actually be able to do? Like, what's his actual power set?" So when we're translating the characters from the MOBA into the single player games, we get to think a lot about, "Okay, well, how does this kit work in the game, and how's that kit representing his personality and him as a character?"
Ekko, he's a young teenage inventor who can rewind time, he's not particularly aggressive or offensive, it's more parrying or defensive; how does that play into his gap closing? Then we can start to build out the kit. So taking Ekko in, and then we can build a customization onto his toolset with his gadgets. So he uses the Timewinder in the game, you can unlock a heap of variations for the Timewinder and modify it and change it and we let you branch out and build different avenues in character. It feels like we're getting to explore the character from different angles, which we can't usually in the online game. It's almost like that's our duty to do that with our Forge games, because if we can't do it, no one else can really.
Did you feel like you discovered new things about the character in doing that?
Rowan Parker: Absolutely. Not just in the gameplay that we're talking about, the story of the game, we can't really tell deep, meaningful stories with the characters individually in an online, mobile-style game. But we can really tug the threads of the character in a game like Convergence and get to see more of the character and how they would react and interact with the friends and people around them. Using Ekko again as the example, he's a 15, 16 year-old boy that can rewind time; he's never really had to deal with consequences in life. If you can just rewind everything, then you never have to learn to like, you fall off the horse and you get back on - he's never fallen off the horse. He just rewinds everything every time.
So what if we present this character with something that he can't change? And in the game, we challenge the character with like, some things in life are going to happen, and it doesn't matter how many times you rewind it with your magical time rewinding device, you have to learn to overcome some things. And we get to play with the emotional state of the character in a platformer. We can't do that in the League of Legends MOBA game, but we can do that in Convergence.
What have been your favorite things to see fans react to since the game has come out?
Rowan Parker: I think some of the reactions to some of the other characters that we build out into the world is good, because some of the fun of adding the NPCs and other characters to the game is they kind of act as a narrative mirror for the protagonist, where you get to see Ekko reflected in each of the other characters he interacts with and we get to see different sides of his personality. But also some of those other characters kind of become popular or interesting because people like the character.
I think Red in particular stood out as like this - I want to be careful with my wording. I don't want to call her love interest. Ekko and Red's relationship is interesting in the game, and I think players enjoyed us exploring how Ekko would react in certain situations, like how would a 15 year-old boy deal with situations like that if there's stuff that is or isn't being reciprocated. I think the world of Zaun as well in the game, Zaun as a setting is really not something we can explore in our other media or other products.
But Convergence lets you run around in the world of Zaun in a way that we've never really been able to before. So giving players an opportunity to run around Entresol, and run around the Sump, and go and explore upper parts of Zaun and go into tunnels and pipes, and go to the theater and sort of bring it to life as this bustling, living, breathing city. Those two things stand out.
Since its release, Convergence has gotten really good reviews, which is great.
Rowan Parker: Yeah, we are always humbly - thank you to the reviewers and players that review our games.
What do you think it is about this new take on the franchise that is appealing so much to fans?
Rowan Parker: Authenticity. In a single word, authenticity. I think our hardcore League of Legends fans that follow the lore and are involved with the characters and stories appreciate the authenticity that Riot Forge brings to the characters and the world when we make our games. We go to extreme lengths, meticulous due diligence on stories, backstories, interactions, world setting; we go the whole nine yards on everything to make sure that the character feels really true to the core character that we know players have been playing for eight, nine, in some cases 10 years.
We really have to live up to the expectation of fans of the characters first, before we're able to move the character forward and play with the emotional state of the characters. We spend a lot of time up front making sure that we do all of that work so they can trust us, so that when we do play with the character of Ekko and challenge him with things like situations that he can't undo, they feel that it's believable and true to the character. So, in a word: authenticity.
You mentioned being able to explore Zaun in a way that you never have before, were there any challenges in also making sure you included that same authenticity in approaching Zaun from a different angle?
Rowan Parker: Yeah. I mean, not all of it's there when we start, there's a blank canvas in a lot of those spaces. We've been looking at the same concept art for years; both us and players have been looking at these beautiful illustrations of Zaun. There's a balance of: we want to take you to those places in Zaun that you've already seen in artwork, but we also want to show you some new places as well. We think players would be disappointed if they didn't see anything new and they just went to things that are already seen. So we have to work hard to make sure that the new stuff we make feels authentic and it blends with what's already there.
I think the fact that most players didn't realize a lot of the zones in Convergence were new and made for Convergence is a good sign that we did a good job on keeping them true to the style and blending them to the point that players can't really tell which ones are brand new and which ones have always been there for a while. And that that process as well, I need to give props to Double Stallion, because that process is that we have to work deeply with the studio Double Stallion and they pitch a lot of the stuff that we end up doing. This isn't a case of Riot comes in and just says, "Hey, we need you to do X, Y, zed."
We trust the studio's expertise in their genre. And if they say, "Hey, in level five, we need this kind of thing for this kind of gameplay," we start brainstorming ways we could do that. And then we're like, "Okay, we need more aerial space. We need something that's floating, the color palette has to change because we've done green and black for two stages in a row and we can't do green and black again."
So all of these gameplay and artistic constraints blend with needing to make the space in Zaun, and that's how we get stuff like there's the Factorywood industry in level two, there's the theater, which is all balloons and gramophones floating in the sky. We made the Chaincrawler train which flows under a Zaun. There's a carnival zone at the end of the game. All of these are brand new for the game, but players might not realize that, which is a good thing.
What inspired the creation of the free Convergence comic?
Rowan Parker: We wanted to give a little bit of a preamble or prologue leading into the game. It's a fun way to use another medium to explore the character of Ekko a little bit, but we also wanted to feature his friends. So in that particular comic it has the Lost Children of Zaun, the other kids and friends who are in the game with Ekko in the comic. It just gives us more canvas and more space to showcase the interactions and the relationships that they have with each other and how they feel about Ekko rewinding time.
And they poke fun at him like, "Oh, we don't need to worry, you'll just rewind time and fix it for us. You're always rewinding time Ekko. Maybe one day you won't be able to rewind time," like some foreshadowing. It's fun to explore and play with the characters. Also, I think a lot of loyal fans really enjoy just being able to consume more media about their favorite champions.
In of lore, when you're making a new project like this how much of the backstory had already been established and how much was completely new for you guys?
Rowan Parker: So the stories that we tell with all of the games in Forge are usually either built on the foundations or inspired by existing lore and stories that are there. Ruined King, a game we released in 2021, that builds on the Burning Tides and Shadows and Fortune stories which already existed, and then we carry those forward. Or in the case of games like Convergence, it's a self-contained, unique story, but it's true to the characters of Camille and Ekko and Warwick and the champions that we include, so that it feels genuine and authentic to those characters.
But it's its own self-contained story that could conveniently exist potentially anywhere in a timeline. So the characters, the core truths of the characters, the setting, that's all there, and we use that when we start with the stories and the narrative. Those are original and done from scratch with Forge and the studios.
Do you consider them canon?
Rowan Parker: So canon is an interesting question or interesting debate. When we first released Ruined King, we did consider games canon, but since then Riot's been doing a lot of work internally around creating a more consistent, cohesive universe. So I would say Forge games will be likely considered canon going forward, but not everything might be incorporated in the future.
And there's another League of Legends Story game slated to come out, Song of Nunu.
Rowan Parker: Oh yeah, we're still going. We've released two games this year and we were like, "Why not? Why not do three? Sure, we'll do another one." [Laughs]
Can you talk a little bit about what fans can expect from that title?
Rowan Parker: I don't want to preempt any of the stuff that we already have planned for Song of Nunu, so I'm trying to think of the best way to phrase it. I think people have realized at this point that Forge is - our portfolio is actually quite diverse. We have quite a wide spread of genres and types of games. That's not an accident, nothing's really off the table for the kind of stuff we would make.
I always approach it as: what would be the best way to tell the story that we want to tell? Which genres or which types of games can shoulder the narrative load of telling a compelling story with our champions? I'm looking forward to Song of Nunu because it's a much more chill game than maybe anything we've made before - pun intended. [Laughs] That was good, I didn't even plan that. I'm gonna give myself a pat on the back for that.
Source: Riot Forge/YouTube
Convergence: A League of Legends Story is available now for PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC.