When Riot revealed it was adding a champion into League of Legends who can travel through time, some important questions were left unanswered. Namely: how do you incorporate time travel into a real-time multiplayer game? Now we have an explanation and boy does this Ekko guy sound cool.
https://kotaku.com/heres-your-newest-league-of-legends-champion-1703500399
In a lengthy primer on Ekko published today on the League of Legends website, Riot went into detail about how the championâs special abilitiesâthe ones associated with the Q, W, E, and R keysâwill work. While some of Ekkoâs abilities seem like standard moves dressed up with a time-warp theme, others look like theyâre gonna be bonkers.
His passive, âZ-Drive Resonance,â slows down enemies if Ekko hits them three times in a row. He also gets a speed boost if the target is a champion:
His ranged Q attack throws out what looks like some sort of high-tech steampunk boomerang. It looks an awful lot like Sivirâs boomerang, which is also her Q ability. The main difference with Ekkoâs is that it slows enemies:
âParallel Convergence,â Ekkoâs W move, creates a large ethereal dome thatâyou guess itâslows down enemies caught inside of it. A neat twist is that the dome explodes if Ekko walks into it, granting him a shield and stunning his enemies inside in the process.
Then thereâs his E, âPhase Dive.â It lets Ekko dart in a particular direction, then blink over to an enemy.
His ult (R) is where things get really crazy. Riot describes it as a time-reversing mechanic that reminds me of games like Prince of Persia, or even Braid:
Ekko rewinds time, briefly turning untargetable and invulnerable before reappearing wherever he was a few seconds ago. Once he reappears, Ekko recovers a portion of the health he lost over those few seconds while dealing tons of damage to all nearby enemies.
Rewinds time, huh? In the example provided in Riotâs reveal, you can see Ekko starting out between two opponents:
Moving around them…
…before being dropped back where he started. Obviously, in real League games heâll probably do some more exciting stuff than just walking.
League of Legends fans have already started brainstorming about the implications of the new move. âAre they implying if you use your ult before your time clone disappears in lane, you can back, buy items within a few seconds and then ult, youâll be back in lane,â one player wondered on a Reddit thread about the Ekko announcement.
âYes,â a Riot employee responded. âYou can do that.â
League developer Patrick Scarborough, meanwhile, explained in a Twitter exchange this afternoon that the âtimecloneâ that pops up for Ekkoâs ult follows him around the map âindefinitely.â This means that all activating the ult does is send Ekko into his invulnerable phase for a seconds before dropping him back at his original location. In other words: activating the ult doesnât afford Ekko a time window. The time window is already there once he unlocks his ult at level 6.
Given that, Iâm predicting that Ekko will allow League players to indulge in crazy, risky maneuvers. Because they know they now have an opportunity make a quick getaway, so to speak. Later on in his Twitter conversation, for instance, Scarborough said itâs possible to teleport to another lane, kill an enemy champion, then trigger Ekkoâs ult to zap back to his original lane.
The only thing is: youâd have to be able to pull that off in as little as three seconds. But this is League of Legends. Players already know that every millisecond counts.
Lead image from the the League of Legends site Surrender at 20. Other images captured from Riotâs character reveal for Ekko. Sadly, I couldnât figure out how to get the videos to stop autoplaying.
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