League of Legends developer Riot Games has today lifted the lid on Ahri’s new look, as her Art & Sustainability Update (ASU) cycle draws to an end. The Ahri ASU marks the second completed update of its kind after Caitlyn’s in late-2021.
The update, designed to modernise everything from Ahri’s design, to her SFX, to her VFX, has been in the works for several months now. Three months back, a /dev post gave us a proper look at what the studio had been up to, and very soon players will be able to experience the changes first hand.
While a definitive date for the ASU’s release has not been set, executive producer Jeremy Lee says that it will arrive in “just a few weeks”, indicating that players will finally be able to check out the new and improved Ahri for themselves when LoL patch 13.2 rolls around.
As part of the update, several of Ahri’s skin splash arts have been updated: Challenger, Foxfire, Midnight, and Popstar. You can check these out below.
For the uninitiated, Riot says that ASU’s are “primarily focused on sustainability, aka making it easier to develop skins.” The studio achieves this through a “number of things, like refactoring how data is set up in the engine, how art is authored across source art packages, and using modern tools and tech to upgrade the champion.”
With Ahri’s ASU coming to a close, fans of some of League’s more dated champs will be keen for their favourite to be lined up next.
While Riot hasn’t hinted at who will be next, Ahri ASU producer Layla ‘yoganinja’ Jean notes that the studio takes a number of different factors into consideration when deciding who to show some love. These include “tech debt and complexity, art quality, or champion popularity.”
So, with that said, if you’re maining a champ with serious tech debt, you may be in luck.