League of Legends lore has always been a bit funny – and not in the ha-ha kind of way. Like the graphics, it started off rough and tumble. There was a good kingdom and a bad kingdom, there were summoners that brought heroes to battle, and that was really most of the story since they just needed an excuse for people to beat the tar out of each other. But Riot wants more out of the lore now, and they are dedicating an entire team to trying to prove it.

This new lore push only started at the end of 2017, as cited in their post about the updates. Their first task was to assign two team members to dismantling the parts that didn’t work and didn’t make sense. Considering that LoL will be celebrating its ninth birthday this year, and that it now sports 139 champions, that’s a lot of lore to dig through. That also doesn’t count the diaries, comics, newsletters, and random story bits scattered around either. To put it simply – the lore is a mess, but Riot swears that it is important to them to fix this. This seems pretty obvious with the care they took in remaking Swain in a recent patch.

Among the decisions that went into the Swain lore and rework were not just how fans engaged with his age, but how the lore did. If Swain was too old, they argued, he would make for an incapable leader, and fans wouldn’t enjoy it either. Similarly, while they liked the bird theme, they didn’t feel like it really made much sense thematically. After all, Swain turning into a big bird monster wasn’t ever very well explained, but the new Swain making a pact and gaining a form from it – that was something that seemed fitting. Also, his time on the battlefield, and birds picking at the corpses scattered there, seemed a pretty clever connection, far more than what he had before. Reworks of Champions show that Riot isn’t necessarily happy with some of the more bland or cookie-cutter champions they’ve thought up in the past.

While this is what Riot has promised, they are still a long way off. Champions like Zed still suffer pretty severely from ‘generic trope syndrome’ – the evil ninja kills the master for the hidden technique? Okay – so Riot has a lot of territory to cover to live up to their own aspirations. This is in addition to constantly releasing characters, videos, comics, articles, and diaries about the champions. None of that accounts for the wonderfully confusing world of Runeterra either.

For example, the recent in-game Quest “Glory for Noxus” had a simple objective: “Win a game as, with, or against a Noxus champion.” That seemed pretty easy until most fans realized they had no idea what a Noxian was. Many people thought Warwick was from Noxus, but he isn’t, he merely served them in his past lore, but not his new lore. He, like Singed, is actually from Zaun but worked with Noxus at some point, and this is where things start to get confusing.

There is Bandle City, Zaun, Piltover, Noxus, Demacia, Targon, the Solari, Bilgewater, Freljord and that isn’t half of it. There are still the many entities and races of Runeterra, such as the Yordle and the Darkin, that have never fully been explained. Part of making new and exciting characters is giving them the creative full-reign to create new ideas, but it plays hell with consistency and story.

All of that is to say, yes, Riot is doing their best to fix the lore, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.