Artbook: Esports Heroes Esports Aesthetic
“Artbook” is a series of articles by Legendary Play’s art team, led by Karo, to showcase the making of the esports world in Esports Heroes, the latest mobile title by Legendary Play
When approached with deciding of an “Esports Aesthetic” for Esports Heroes, I was very skeptical. In my mind, there was no such thing as an Esport Aesthetic. After all, there are a plethora of different esport games out there, with their own history, dynamic, crowd, level of seriousness and production.
If you compare for example, League of Legends, the biggest game in the world with a colossal number of monthly active players, constant in-game and circuit updates, a multitude of competing professional productions vying for the one graphics package that pleases the eye of the fans the most. And classic Tetris, a game that has not been changed for almost 40 years. The only live competitions even today take place in backrooms of conventions, with both competing players sitting so close to each other that they can “screenlook” — peeking at their opponent’s monitor to scout for future development. Naturally, the graphics used are minimalistic at best, mostly just a slightly adjusted view of the very game the players themselves can see.
In light of these vast differences — and there are endless additions to be made to an exhaustive esports scale — can there even be a unique esports aesthetic?
The “Essence” of Esports
An overarching aesthetic spanning so many different games, fanbases etc. would have to be tied to more than just one of the many esports with various levels of reach and success. We ventured out to try and find an “Essence” of esports as a whole. Elements that defined and united the different graphics and aesthetics — a toehold on which we could build our esport themed game.
As we gathered reference after reference, an underlying structure manifested itself, grouping the different factors together. One huge contribution factor in the realm of esports is the fanbase, or rather the fanbases. Uniting, and even tying together many different esports audiences, the fan culture in esports presents a new, unique picture amongst sports fanbases. No matter the sport one follows, be it esports or traditional, the more invested one becomes the more time and energy they will be willing to allocate to their passion. A true fan of a team will experience a wide range of emotions from elation to devastation, happy moments and sad ones alternate regularly. While fan arts and chants overlap quite heavily with traditional sports, some other aspects are defined by the fresh and young nature of the esports audience. Memes play a huge role in the framework of esports fan culture, to the point where popular memes make their ways onto official broadcasts, tweets and reddit interactions are prominently featured and discussed around the games.
A first conclusion towards defining an “Essence” of esports was reached as we understood the importance of memes in the world of esports. Thus, they will also appear regularly in our game Esports Heroes, as a means to convey both emotion of the goings-on during the game as well as an easy and familiar esports framework for our audience.
The next important aspect of esports is the prevalence of highly specialized broadcasts. As in most sports, both traditional and esports, different broadcasts handle the presentation differently. This is true almost to an extreme degree when it comes to esports, where the presentation of the game will vary tremendously. During the match, broadcasts still try to distinguish themselves with their own spin on helpful graphics, their individual colour codes, as well as added features for the viewers benefit, for example instant replays.
The diversity and variability of esports broadcasts was an aspect that we took to heart for our game’s aesthetics, as match layouts and stage designs will reflect these differences and immerse the player into the esports world.
We reflect with similar feelings on the learnings regarding the staple that is analyst desk segments, which play a hugely important role in esports before, between and after the games. Here, more than anywhere else during the broadcast, is where each team of broadcasters can strive to make their product unique, and many different esports games and leagues take this to heart, arguably much more so than traditional sports broadcasts. Consequently, everything surrounding the competition in Esports Heroes will take a page out of that book and aim to be as flavour- and colourful as possible.
If there is specific focus on an individual player, it is often expressed in interviews, which come to life through things like the shared meme culture between broadcast talent and players to a degree that is very seldomly found in traditional sports. The light-hearted, honest communication with players is another idiosyncrasy of the esports world that we will try to express through close angles in our game.
Research Methods
Social media was the biggest and most important means of research. With the ever-growing social media presence of players, teams and broadcast talents, individual twitter pages and official event and team pages provided us with a great variety of material. Instagram was another valuable source.
Many esports broadcasts even have their own professional photographers, of which a few are allowed to make their pictures publicly available. A great example are the Flickr pages from LoL esports, which provide invaluable angles, behind the scene shots and stage photos that would otherwise remain obscure to the outside world. Lastly, many esport organizations create their own interesting websites, on which we were privy to their side of the coin.
Outcome
As expected, there is not one art style that can be easily agreed upon by looking at esports broadcasts. The sheer variety of presentation even in just one of the big games from one broadcast team to the next presents an exciting if not somewhat overwhelming challenge to channel all these impressions into one aesthetic for our game for esport fans.
However, we think we distilled our very own idea of what the “Essence” of esports might be; and which constraints and guidelines will guide the aesthetics in Esports Heroes..
Esports follow the newest design trends using the best Design agencies in the world. Just in the past few years multiple different esports broadcasters, including ESL and Riot Games worked with famous agencies like “superunion”. Very few esport broadcasts will keep the same appearance for more than a year, sometimes changing with the seasons, not shying away from any extra expenses.
Esport designs by and large aim to emulate the feeling of an environment bustling with movement and unsteadiness, thus emulating the nature of the game. In an attempt to reflect the unique gist of the combination of sports and video games, they go out of their way to be interesting and fun on the eye.
Esport designs look different in different parts of the world. Unsurprisingly, people in different parts of the world prefer different designs. Esport broadcasts take the liberty to follow these demands instead of striving for a unified “professional” design. If at all possible, we want to follow this finding and incorporate styles from many different parts of the world.
Conclusion
After many hours of research, discussions, gathering and overthrowing of references, we are confident that we have found style(s) that esports fans will feel familiar with and love. In accordance with our findings, we want to reflect the multitudinousness of esports aesthetics in the many different parts of our game. No matter which esports has found its way to the heart of any given fan opening our game for the first time, the variety of designs will soon capture their enthusiasm for Esports Heroes.
