After years of silence, Riot has finally spoken up about Ao Shin. In a post on the Riot message boards, Iniquitee posted that Ao Shin will not be coming out the way he was first described. For years nobody knew if the champion was still being worked on or completely canned. Only brief quotes from Rioters that said he was “on hold” and would be revisited in the future.
In 2013, Riot released the teaser for Ao Shin. He was a dragon who would interact with the game in a way that had never been seen before. Riot said: “It's too early to go into much detail, but we're really excited about the ways this champion will move across the battlefield.”
Another dragon called Aurelion Sol will be released, but won’t have much in common with his inspiration.
“Ao Shin’s kit just didn't pass muster. This is a pretty common problem we run into in the initial stage of champion creation, and while sometimes we can adjust on the fly ... other times we need to shelve the entire concept and take a step back,” Inquitee wrote in the dev blog post.
Around the time of the initial announcement Riot slowed down their champion releases, going from roughly one a month to just a few a year. Riot only wanted champions that were unique and truly deserving of a spot in the game. Other characters have been scrapped for the same reason, like the now infamous Omen.
Little things started to add up, and getting a serpentine body to work in a game with 360 degrees of movement wasn’t easy in 2013. Even though we don’t have Ao Shin, we have the amazing concept art and Spirit Guard Udyr comic panel.
R.I.P. Ao Shin: 2013-2016. We hardly knew thee.
