Sylas/Development

Champion Roadmap: August 2018[edit | edit source]

That's it for today! But I'll leave you with one last bit of info on new champions. Besides the colorful new mage currently in hiding, we have another new champion locked away, with no release date in sight...

Champion Reveal: Sylas[edit | edit source]

Once I was a prisoner. Like you. Locked away by cowards and hypocrites. Left to die for the way I was born. Nothing to live for but vengeance. Nothing to lose but my chains. Yet in the revolution to come—our revolution—these chains will liberate us all. And I will make sure we are never shackled again.^[2]

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Petricite Burst

After casting a spell, Sylas' next basic attack whirls his chains around him, damaging nearby enemies.

Playing as Sylas

As Sylas, you lash out with merciless magical attacks, pummeling those who would oppose you with stone and steel. Beat down your enemies with repeated Chain Lash, following each flogging with a basic attack for a whirling Petricite Burst. Elude arrest and position yourself with Abscond before choosing a hostage to hook with Abduct. When your struggle becomes a matter of life and death, end the oppression with a crushing Kingslayer strike.

When you reach level six, unleash your full potential and Hijack the powers of your foes for a greater purpose—your own. By the late game you can seize multiple ultimates in quick succession, using the enemy team's own strength against them and bringing your revolution to a violent conclusion. In the end, they will be the ones who kneel.

Watch me break a kingdom.

Tips and Tricks

Crush your foes in combat by weaving in basic attacks after each spellcast for maximum damage. The perfect sequence includes a Petricite Burst after every ability, leaving enemies bruised and broken—if not dead.

Consider all your options when Hijacking ultimates. What do you need most right now? What might be critical a little later? Seizing a brutal finishing move could clinch your current skirmish, but taking a powerful crowd control spell might win you the next teamfight.

You can't Hijack the same enemy for a while after you take their ability, so plot out the full revolt before you start stealing ults. There's no rush to use what you have, but hesitate too long and you'll miss opportunities to unleash even more ultimates. Triumph over your opponents by picking the right time—and power—to turn against them.

"You picked the wrong side."

Dev Doodles: Sylas[edit | edit source]

Real devs. Real stories. Real doodles.

In the first episode of Dev Doodles, devs recount some of the challenges they faced while creating Sylas, a champion who steals ultimates from other champions.

Animated by: Ehlboy

ORIGINS: Sylas[edit | edit source]

By Landess 'SMALL BABY PANDA' Cole^[3]

Sylas of Dregbourne, everyone’s favorite ult-stealing skirmisher, is moody and mutinous—the product of a near-lifetime locked up. He’s revolutionary, resentful, stronk af, and a little bit cocky. But he didn’t start that way.

When concept artist Snuny “Kindlejack” Pinatdat first joined the Champions Team, he started working on a top lane mage—a gameplay archetype that doesn’t have many champions on the roster and might bring an influx of players to the most cursed lane.

“The original idea was a young, female champion who was cute and bubbly and fun,” he explains.

“And then we made Sylas.”

Got Your Spell

While Krinklejank explored concepts for the cute, bubbly, fun champ, senior game designer Blake “Squad5” Smith started working on the kit. He began by tinkering with an ability he’d wanted to make for years: spell-stealing.

But there was one small enormous problem: League wasn’t coded for spell-stealing abilities.

“I didn’t think that it was technically possible because I had asked some engineers before and they were like ‘No, don’t do that, you’re crazy,’” Squad5 recalls. But after securing a soft maybe from some other engineers, he took off running with the spell-stealing concept.

“I had a super, super rough version of the spell that would become Sylas’ R and I had to set it up in a really janky way. But pretty much immediately after the first internal playtest we knew that the ability was awesome.”

Regardless of how fun it was to play, actually building the ultimate became something of an engineer’s nightmare. For spell-stealing to work in League, the engineering team had to do a major overhaul of every ability in the game.

The nitty gritty of the challenge requires big engineer brain, but to put it simply, up until that point spells in League weren’t set up in a way where another champ could access them. Spells were essentially hardbound to each champion.

Before Sylas, the concept of an ability—how a spell runs from start to finish—didn’t really exist in League’s backend. Most spells existed within an individual champion’s scripts, so the game engine didn’t understand each ability on its own. Spell passives weren’t a self-contained concept either. So for abilities and their accompanying passives to transfer over to Sylas, the engineering team needed to build out those systems and implement them for every champion in the game.

“The game engine essentially needed to put each spell into a capsule and say ‘Everything in here is what you need, and nothing else, and I know how long you need it,’” explains game engineer Chris “Griftrix” Laubach.

It was a massive undertaking. Essentially every spell in the game had to get refactored, which was a lot on its own, but there was also the added complexity of shapeshifters like Nidalee and Jayce, and the fact that some spells scale off AD while Sylas uses AP.

“Every time I see the engineers that helped me on Sylas’ ultimate, I still apologize and thank them to this day,” Squad5 laughs.

But the engineering team’s work paid off in a huge way. Beyond becoming Sylas’ signature spell and pushing the boundaries of abilities in League, Sylas’ ultimate also helped the team devise the look and personality of the champion.

Demacia's Dark Secret

At this point, the plucky top lane mage was still the direction the team was headed, and the initial plan was to use the spell-stealing ability for good. But they quickly realized stealing spells doesn’t feel very heroic—for Sylas or his opponents.

“When we started playtesting , the very first feedback that we got on this spell was ‘This feels mean, this feels really mean,’” Squad5 said. “There was a smugness to it, like ‘I just feel good killing you with your thing because f*&^ you.’”

So the team went back to the drawing board with the goal of creating a darker character.

They toyed around with ideas like a tricksy sorceress or a zealous Mageseeker. A pitch for a braggadocious Houdini-esque character who could master any spell and escape any prison got some traction, but it started to feel sleightly corny.

That’s when narrative writers John “JohnODyin" O’Bryan and Rayla “Jellbug” Heide came up with the idea of a prisoner minus the escape artist abilities—a powerful mage locked up in Demacia for fifteen years.

“We started to riff on the ideas of Petricite and Demacia as a country,” Kanklejazz says. “What if Sylas was something that Demacia decided to bury?”

Demacia is known as a city of light and order, the home of beloved champs like Garen, Jarvan, and Lux. But the effort to drive magic from its borders—however well-intentioned—left a revolution seething beneath all that Petricite. A revolution that only needed an intelligent, charismatic leader to get off the ground.

Enter Sylas.

Sylas originates from a lesser region of Demacia, born with the magical ability to see hidden sorcery and redirect others’ magical powers. At a young age, he even helped the Mageseekers root out magical people in hiding.

But after an incident that left two Mageseekers and a young girl dead, Sylas was locked up and left to rot in a Demacian prison, chained with Petricite shackles.

“I immediately jumped on the idea of chains and shackles as the key weapon and imagery. I really liked that the ultimate ability was taking the power of your enemy and turning it against them,” explains Kinderjab. “And the chains are kind of a metaphor for that—taking the symbols of your oppression and using them to gain your freedom.”

But joke’s on you, NPC guards. The Petricite shackles only made Sylas stronger, allowing him to store and control his magic.

“Without shackles his magic just sprays uncontrollably like water from a busted hydrant,” says JohnODyin. “The shackles gave him a battery for it, like a control valve where he could store it, use it at will, and focus it.”

As the concept art began to take shape, Kinojam meticulously thought through the details of Sylas’ life. What does he eat in prison? Why are his pants so tight? How is he so buff? (He’s fed well by the Demacians but is a drama queen about it; they’re the same pants he was wearing when he was first imprisoned at a young age; compound lifts with outrageously oversized chains.)

Sylas’ muscle-bound prisoner persona fed into his gameplay—and vice versa. As playtesting progressed, Squad5 realized many stolen ultimates worked best if Sylas could go all in. Making Sylas a melee skirmisher with some mobility instead of a traditional mage allowed him to use spells like Amumu’s ult without getting instantly deleted.

Sylas’s story becomes intertwined with Lux’s when she wanders down to the dungeons of Demacia. She starts bringing Sylas books and manuscripts, one of which reveals the powers of Petricite, the key for Sylas to finally escape.

And his escape sparks a rebellion within Demacia.

The Future of Demacia and Sylas

For the narrative team, the story of a revolutionary within a society like Demacia came together pretty seamlessly. The kingdom’s persecution of mages created a powder keg just waiting for a spark.

“Once we knew we had this character in a place where magic was outlawed, he sort of wrote himself,” JohnODyin said. “Who would that guy be? What’s the logical conclusion of a person who is oppressed by that system and has to fester in it? What would he become? And what would he be to other people who are in his position? History is full of examples, so you don’t have to look far. To me, the fun part about Sylas was that we’re asking a question about Demacia that doesn’t really have a good answer.”

Sylas’ escape rips the idealized, static version of Demacia wide open. The King of Demacia, Jarvan IV’s father, is killed in the wake of Sylas’ breakout, leaving the kingdom in disarray. Sylas begins recruiting followers—many exiled mages—to stoke his revolution. He then travels to the Freljord in the hopes of gathering more allies and finding powerful, ancient magic. And his story only continues to unfold.

Though he strives to bring down the Demacian monarchy, his status as a villain is ambiguous at best. His existence adds much-needed complexity to Demacia.

“No disrespect to Garen or Lux mains, but Demacia needed some sort of conflict,” JohnODyin says. “It can’t just be that really simplistic chivalry idea. It can’t exist in a vacuum; there has to be something for it to struggle with internally.”

And his story pushed the whole of Runeterra’s story forward, Squad5 explains.

“It almost feels like around the time that Sylas came out, we started to be a little more comfortable as a company, as an IP, actually having some things move forward and change.”

So where will Sylas’ story take us next? Is he really—as he so confidently claims—the true Demacia? We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Trivia[edit | edit source]

Sylas is voiced by Fergus O'Donnell.^[4]
The goals for Sylas were to create a Demacian villain and a champion who could steal spells.^[5]
Influences for Sylas include Jason Statham, Huey Long, Kratos from God of War, Xander Cage, Tai Lung from Kung Fu Panda, Zaheer from The Legend of Korra, Bane from The Dark Knight Rises and Sagat and Cody from Street Fighter.^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12]
During development Hijack was tested as a skillshot but proved too unreliable.^[13]
Neeko and Sylas were in development at similar times and would result in confusing playtests due to both Sylas and Neeko changing appearances.^[14]
Sylas' color palette is that of Demacia's colors, but faded, in order represent that his love for his country faded, but not fully gone.^[15]
Sylas' kit was designed around Hijack, meaning he had to have a generalist kit in order to work with every ultimate in game.^[16]
Sylas' placeholder models in development were LeBlanc, Ekko, Annie and Fiddlesticks.^[17]^[18]
Some of Sylas' scrapped spells from development include:
- An ability where he would absorb any damage he took for a few seconds then detonate it against enemies.
- Blooming Burst
- A skillshot that left a glyph on the ground that could be detonated with a subsequent skillshot.
- A spell that would break all crowd control effects on him.
- An iteration of Hijack that would permanently mark Garen as the Villain if he stole Demacian Justice.^[19]^[20]
- An ability similar to Mordekaiser's Realm of Death.^[21]
Sylas was the most technically challenging champion developed by Riot.^[22]
One of the potential directions explored for Sylas was an escape artist mage who purposely allowed themselves to be captured by Demacia in order to prove they could escape from any prison. However they did not account for petricite and were driven insane while incarcerated.^[23]
Sylas' in development name was CopyCat.^[24]
Sylas' placeholder visual effects include recolored Illaoi tentacles in the place of Chain Lash, Ethereal Chains in the place of Abduct and Lancer Paragon Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab in the place of Hijack.^[25]
His theme has sections from Demacia Rising throughout its duration.
The Warriors Cinematic Season 2020 Asset Pack includes models of him and his chains depicted in the cinematic.