League of Legends is over a decade old, and the people who played it originally are well aware of its age. Characters, items, and the entire map have gone through several major game-changing reworks, both in terms of gameplay and appearance.

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These changes have come from all sorts of reasons, ranging from pro-player concerns to casual experiences. If you haven't played League of Legends in a long time, or you're just looking to reminisce about the game's strange history, these are some of the biggest things that have lead to the game we see today.

10 Updated Graphics

The new Summoners Rift from League of Legends

If you haven't played League of Legends since either 2014 or 2012, you've likely missed a huge transformation that hit Summoner's Rift on the visual side of things. New textures, monster designs, and even turrets with better animations have given the game an incredibly fresh appearance, changing things a lot from the dated visuals of the original game's release.

The core game is still mostly the same, but everything from the UI to the map has become much easier to read, with the background also losing some color to make the champions stand out more. It's a great quality of life change that has helped the game look far less dated, especially when looking at championship games of its early years.

9 New Champions

Rell, Lillia, and Viego in their League of Legends Splash Art

At the time of writing, there are just over 150 champions in League of Legends, meaning your character options have more than tripled since the game's release in 2009. This is mostly thanks to the roles becoming more defined, as the metagame led Riot to understand what types of innovations could be made for different characters.

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What's interesting about this is that the rate that new champions have been released has also slowed down in recent years, as Riot decided a few years ago that forcing new characters into the game took away from other updates. This means new characters are less frequent but tend to be a lot more polished.

8 Better Skins

Splash art from League of Legends for Pulsefire Ezreal

If you've ever wondered why League of Legends skins cost more than they used to, you can partially blame Pulsefire Ezreal. This Ultimate Skin was an entirely new creation, giving brand new particle effects and animations at a higher cost, and many felt this quality of skins shouldn't be so rare.

After this skin's release in 2012, Riot made an effort to make far more skins with improved effects and animations. While most new ones are more expensive, they're far more worth your money as a result. A new skin is a huge cosmetic shift, while simple color changes have been moved to the less expensive Chroma shop.

7 Mythic Items

Leona standing by Locket of the Iron Solari in League of Legends

One of the more recent changes to the game has to do with the item shop, which got a major rework that featured the removal of many useless items and a more fluid recommendation system. This also came with the introduction of Mythic Items, which grant more powerful effects along with stat boosts to other items.

This has made the past season of League of Legends incredibly more diverse, as builds have far less monotony when you have to build around a specific selection that fits your character. Many can be quite similar at their core, but these new Mythic Items have created a much less complicated item system that makes everything more interesting to buy.

6 Dragon Buffs

Art of the fire dragon from League of Legends

There are two recent changes from about a year ago that helped make Summoner's Rift feel fairly distinct, particularly compared to other MOBA games. The first of these is the introduction of dragon buffs, where killing a dragon would grant your team one of four different stat boosts depending on the random elemental dragon that you happened to encounter in its spawn point.

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Teams can also receive an additional buff for killing four dragons in a game, making for a better value for killing dragons than ever before. This, alongside a game-breaking Elder Dragon buff available to both teams after the final normal dragon is slain, has led to a wider set of objectives for teams to focus on.

5 New Brush

The new Bottom Lane from League of Legends

Alongside the dragon buffs came another change to Summoner's Rift that might be the most bizarre to players of other MOBA games, and that would be the expanded brush throughout the map. Not only did some areas in the jungle get more curved bushes to lurk around, but the top and bottom lanes both got entirely new alleyways that champions could hide and sneak through.

This has made the top and bottom lanes far more dramatic, giving a new area for junglers to sneak through and a wider range of directions to clash from. New players can appreciate the greater options, but veterans have had a blast finding new ways to utilize this extra territory as best as possible.

4 Role Calling

Choosing a role in the League of Legends client

It would take hours to explain every change that has happened in the Ranked Play section of League of Legends, but simply put it's become a much more natural system that generally replaces standard play. The ban system has become more fluid, professional players have a much cleaner ladder to climb, and gaining ranks has featured far more rewards for most players.

All that said, the real greatest change came in the form of an automated role system, where you can choose what lane and position you intend to play before the game starts. Dealing with the chat room to claim a lane was exhausting, and while some players feel this system hurts creative team structures, it makes playing solo queue significantly easier. It also means you can turn the chat off in most instances.

3 Teamfight Tactics

Screenshot of the original Teamfight Tactics

This isn't exactly a change in the same sense as other updates on this list, but Teamfight Tactics deserves a special mention due to how significant an addition this was. League of Legends has always had multiple game modes, but this is the first time that a fundamentally new game has been added to the client, using the same characters and models for a fully new combat system.

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This is the first of many new games from Riot, and quickly showed their interest in creating more than just League of Legends. The brand is now far more than just Summoner's Rift, and many players generally consider that freedom and creativity to be a strength that bleeds into the core game.

2 Classic Champion Reworks

Fiddlesticks after his rework in League of Legends

Alongside new characters have been a long list of reworked champions, where a classic character receives a new moveset and updated visuals to fit the game's map. Some of these have been relatively new characters that never found a home in competitive play like Xerath and Volibear, but even some classics like Fiddlesticks have gotten massive changes to make them easier to play.

Few games will go back to change old content like this, and it does a great job of revitalizing a character's interest and skillset. Not every character necessarily needs a big change, but the ones that are lucky enough to get one are usually way more interesting because of it.

1 No More Runes

The new Rune page from League of Legends

The last and most underrated change worth mentioning is the shift to runes, which were originally a collectible item you would buy with in-game currency to raise your stats. Simply put, these weren't fun, and it meant that playing in top-level games required an obscene amount of grinding to compete with others.

This is likely the reason that rune pages were massively reworked a few years ago, removing purchasable items and instead supplying players with a variety of unique passive buffs and effects that could be customized at no cost. These are far better than passive stat boosts and make each character feel more customizable before the game even starts. This has been a great change that simultaneously makes for better high-level and low-level play.

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