What Elise Could Have Been

What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Unlike a lot of the other champions we’ve covered in What Could Have Been videos, there’s
actually not a whole lot of information available about her production.
Part of this is down to the fact that Elise is a pretty old champion, from back when Riot
weren’t as transparent about the development process.
In addition to that, Elise was heavily based on another cancelled champion, so most of
the available information is about the process that took her from the cancelled concept to
the champion we know today.
This original concept was known at the time as Priscilla, the Spider Queen.
Her development actually began way back in 2009, as a Victorian-esque half spider-woman;
so essentially a spider body with a female torso and head.
As you can probably tell from the concept art, despite being quite far forward on her
development Riot weren’t really satisfied with the direction they had chosen for her
gameplay and visuals.
Priscilla’s artwork, abilities and spell icons remained in the game for a long time,
so we actually know the names of her original abilities: Camouflage, Corpsemaker, Ensnare,
Inject Spiderlings and Thirst.
As you can imagine, it mostly involves staying out of sight before rooting an enemy and killing
them in all sorts of gross spidery ways.
Although Riot ended up ditching the concept, they clearly found some parts of the design
interesting and didn’t want to give up on it entirely.
We don’t know what happened in the downtime between Priscilla’s cancellation and the
development of Elisa, but in early 2011 a player named Koopatroopa started a poll on
the official League boards.
By this point, the community had learned about the development and subsequent cancellation
of Priscilla.
In a response to a Riot Zileas quote about doing what the community wanted, the poll
was launched in an effort to demonstrate the player base’s interest in seeing the Spider
Queen return to complete her development cycle and make it into the game.
Over 24,000 players signed the poll, and although it’s not known whether Riot had been secretly
developing Elise before this point, it’s generally accepted that it served as motivation
for Riot to explore the qualities that had initially interested them in creating a spider
champion.
Riot Morello noted that every time they attempted to create a similarly-themed champion, they
ended up falling a little short.
Once they found an iteration of her design that was good, they went full steam ahead
and powered through the rest of the development.
There were two sources that helped generate this ‘spark’ that resulted in the creation
of Elise.
The first of which were the qualities that Riot liked about Priscilla; she was an elegant
yet evil noblewoman turned spider.
The second was the work of senior concept artist Paul Kwon, otherwise known as Riot
Zeronis.
Zeronis took it on himself to revamp Priscilla into a new character, depicting Elise as we
know her today.
It split Priscilla’s shaky design into two separate parts; a sleek, graceful humanoid
form, and a terrifying spider.
Finally Riot had the missing piece to their Spider Queen vision, and just in time to start
development in order to line up with the release of the Shadow Isles and Harrowing.
One of the most difficult tasks for Riot was ensuring that her model, appearance and animations
properly delivered on what players would expect for their first spider champion.
Lead animator Riot Ohmikegoodness shared a lot of information about the process, mentioning
that a lot of work went into keeping Elise’s in-game silhouette as recognizable as possible
without being messy or cluttered.
Elise was one of the most visually interesting champions Riot had ever developed at the time,
so it was important that players could appreciate those aspects of her visual design.
Originally, the Spider Queen looked sort of metallic or futuristic, leading many to theorize
that she acted as inspiration for Urgot in addition to Elise.
Riot cgsammu commented that Riot wanted to go for a much more organic design rather than
the sharp segmented plates of the original, leading them to a middle ground that you can
see today in Elise’s design.
Ohmikegoodness also talked a lot about the animation process—he spent a lot of time
working on tiny micro-movements of her limbs to give that unnerving feel that a spider
should.
Riot knew from the start that Elise needed to be super creepy to do the theme justice,
but ohmikegoodness apparently went too far at times.
He noted that he tried to create a huge gap between her human and spider forms, so any
elements of her spidery nature in her human form (such as the legs on her back) were also
animated to be twitchy and creepy like real spider legs.
In the end, he had to settle for a less creepy variant—at least for her human form—meaning
she’d stand up straight and be a lot less twitchy.
Prior to the changes, her human form was as equally frightening as her spider form.
Although that’s probably a win from a thematic perspective, shifting the creepiness over
to the spider form made the transformation a lot more impactful.
One of the other key issues Riot encountered was making her webs look ‘webby’ enough.
For starters, webs shouldn’t usually be visible, otherwise you’d never walk into
one.
At the same time, they needed her webs to be recognizable as actual webs, but there
also had to be magical and mysterious elements present—she’s from the Shadow Isles after
all.
VFX artist Riot STEEN had a fair bit of difficulty combining good looking webs with Elise’s
color palette, it just didn’t mesh well at all.
In the end, he used realistic looking webs with a few magical VFX elements worked in,
and managed to find a balance that fit Elise thematically whilst also not looking too distracting
in game.
As a character occupying a pretty unique niche in the game as a kind of ‘AP Bruiser,’
it was important for Riot to find abilities that properly explored that niche without
turning her into something different.
For example, one of her original passives was a Singed poison trail in her Spider Form.
When you turned back into a human, the silk trail would solidify into terrain that you
could work on, essentially turning Elise into a much more disruptive force.
This iteration of her design didn’t actually have her ‘bruiser’ elements such as Rappel
or her gap-closing Q, so she was more like a mage assassin with a terrain-creation ability.
It was a pretty weird mix, and probably part of what drove them further into bruiser territory.
Another ability that caused similar issues was an AoE web that she could use in her human
form.
If it landed on multiple targets, it would web them together in a similar fashion to
Cocoon, but with a twist; the webbed targets would also share damage.
This is the kind of ability you might find on a mage or support, but for a bruiser/assassin
it wasn’t a good fit.
Although the invention of Rappel helped move Elise away from the conventional mage playstyle,
she very nearly had another disruptive ability in her arsenal.
At one point, rather than jumping to her targets with Rappel, she’d create webs that ensnared
all enemies that ran underneath her.
This was apparently only cancelled because there was no time to make it work before Halloween,
when Elise was scheduled for release.
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What Elise Could Have Been

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