Legends of Runeterra's Patch 2.2 has brought many changes including our first significant change to the card frames. The region icon is now displayed on the top-right of each card instead of watermarked within the card text, and it would be an understatement to say that some players do not care for this new layout. JeffExpress, Principal UX Designer on LoR, responded to some reddit comments and provided some insight into why Riot made this change.
Quote From u/JeffExpress "In case you were wondering why Riot said they needed to move the region icon to have more card real estate for the text of complex cards. Despite the humor tag, this is not a joke: this is the actual Japanese Aphelios. German is a close second place."
Ouch! I also wish it was a joke that our text can get so long on some of our cards. Moving the region icons is a small step toward getting things in the right place. I think our spell cards, especially champion spells, really suffer with the region icons on the bottom.
We do have some more changes to card frames in the future that we’re getting ready for. In the meantime I’ll take the feedback to the rest of the team. Thanks all!
"nothing 'suffers' from having the region icon at bottom and you should have kept them at the bottom. The frame idea is brilliant. Each region having their own tinted frame (or even having different designs) should be the overt way to display the region. Not outright ruining the aesthetic of every card but adding what is essentially a glorified mole."
Tinting frames different colors is an idea we explored but ran into issues since we already use frame color to denote whether a unit is a follower or a champion (and hopefully eventually a champ spell or spell) plus prismatics. The biggest reason is that it could be more difficult for players who see colors differently. Thanks for the suggestion and the feedback.
"Just out of curiosity why couldn't you have just let the text go over the region icon on the bottom of the card for cards that have too much text. Surely players who don't know and want to know what the region of a card is would still be able to tell even if it was somewhat obstructed by text."
Well that’s what we were doing before and it wasn’t great! Ha ha! Where things were getting especially bad was if we wanted to have any text with interaction (yellow keywords, blue hyperlinks) on top of the region icons (which players can also tap)
During R&D I was often jealous of MTG and how simple and intuitive their color system is for the frames. But I do love exploring our regions and maybe in the future I can be confident everyone can get all the region icons.
"Since the card text is on the player side, wouldn't it be simple to just change the location of the region on your cards in the player settings instead of forcing people on a setting they don't like?"
In general I like to keep the structure of the card the same for all players so the game is easier for onboarding (not having to adjust our tutorials), easier to share (everyone sees the same thing), and easier for us to develop (especially QA!!!). But beyond that we have some future plans for our card frames that we needed to move somethings around for and I’m sure you don’t want to miss out on that. Thanks! And if it really sucks to play with after a few days let me know
"Could I ask a question? Is there really even a need for a change? I feel like the colour scheme of regions, the 2 region lock in a game and consistent art style for each region allows you to overlap the icon? I feel like if the structure of the card gets disrupted it just makes the game look more busy(something not ideal) and also disrupts how cards are actually shown from when cast (spells are circular and so are they on the stack, followers and rectangular and they are also rectangular when introduced to the bench.)"
Of course you can always ask!
Yes, there really was a need for the change. Not only were we trying to make things more clear, but these changes also set us up for some new features coming soon that I think you all will be excited about.
And just to remind everyone he's human and has a sense of humor, Jeff also left this gem of a response to a joke thread.
Quote From u/JeffExpress "Adding to the discourse of the new placement of the region icon, voilà"
Amazing! I love this!
What are your feelings about the new card layout? Do you wish Riot would revert the changes at the cost of making complicated cards like Aphelios hard to read? Tell us below!
Comments
I understand the reasoning but they could have been better, I mean even fans came with better solution
Will need to get used to it, but I think it's fine, if zi didn't knew cards I wouldn't notice the watermark it makes them more obvious they belong to X region.
Bad changes imo. If they're making further improvements, why release this half-baked and controversial update now?
With units, nothing actually changed.
While the new icon's design may be subjective, text still covers the art just as much, but there's now a large empty space at the bottom.
While some spells such as
do not have overlapping text and icon now, the speed is still redundantly displayed twice. For differentiating those, we already have the icon, color and border. And (conveniently) it takes away as much space as the region icon.
Fair, but you have to consider these are only the immediate results. They could still potentially go edit German & Japanese versions in future patches to pull the text block down, showing more of Aphelios's upper body. There also are probably even more wordy cards they haven't revealed yet that benefit from this change even more.
Where did those pictures of German Aphelios come from? The new one is on a white background, and the old one is on a black background.
Old one is from the article, new one is from Mobalytics but I had to use Snipping Tool because they use .webp format, which Imgur doesn't accept.
I think the background is an artifact of the conversion process -- the card art itself has a transparency layer, which will get automatically filled in with a solid color when saved as JPG. For the article, I actually considered editing out the background in Photopea and resaving it as a PNG, but I figured that was a few minutes extra work for a detail nobody would even notice -- I was wrong! >.<
If their is one thing I have learned from playing CCGs for a long time: I don't care about card arts, card aesthetics, boards, cards backs and what not. I kind of want to but I don't.
So I really don't care about region icon placement and frames.
I think they look just fine.
The spell one is a little odd, but would look better if the frame was square. They could keep the round image but make the card more square...
I honestly think that the new frames are an improvement. Still not what I'd call perfect, but better.
But, no matter what you think looks better, you have to admit: their card text needs all the space it can get.
My day be so fine,
than bam
I get reminded that glorious jinx design isn’t in the gam