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Riot Games added Sylas to League of Legends all the way back in 2019. By today's standards, Sylas is already entering the territory of an older champion.
His release, however, was preceded by Riot Games having to upend the way they coded champion abilities in League of Legends, and that means changing hundreds of parts of the game, and the essence of every champion.
The idea of the champion began with a bubbly mage, who steals abilities and uses them for good. And while that was later changed to fit an, admittedly, better theme, the stealing part of his ultimate remained as the champion core.
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, explain the devs.
As they describe, 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.
Thus, Sylas’ engineering challenge created better standards for League’s engine in the long run, and it paved the way for Viego and Ultimate Spellbook.
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