State of the Agents - Yoru

Hey everyone!

Ryan “Rycoux” Cousart, game/character designer, is here with me (John Goscicki, character producer) to be upfront with where Yoru is at and where he’s headed. But before we dig into some of the details of what we are looking to do, we wanted to outline our thought process going into Yoru’s update.

It’s fair to say that when Yoru launched there was a TON of excitement around this boyo, but as y’all experimented with him, many of you hit the conclusion that his outputs were not on par with the rest of the roster. We took the time to really look at what Yoru should be offering, and give him more/different tools to bring to life an effective version of the fantasy y’all have latched onto.

So without me blabbering on more, let's hand this over to the person behind the recent design work on Yoru. He has videos!

DESIGN GOALS: WHAT’S CHANGING?

Hello, again everyone :D

I’m usually constrained to 280 characters when talking about Yoru, so I’m excited to use infinite space to talk about what we’ve been cooking. As John mentioned, we were floored by the excitement for Yoru and our vision for what he could offer to the roster—but felt there were some gaps we needed to address.

Your feedback along with the gameplay from those of you that have tried to make Yoru work has sparked a vision we are hoping to ignite: Yoru becomes a master of deception through an increased output of disinformation from round to round.

So what does this mean?

We’ve learned that in addition to our duelists needing to offer something unique to the field, they also need to have a strong baseline value that any team at any round can rely on in order to maintain strong viability on any team composition. Yoru’s payoff “dream plays” seem to only happen after rounds of conditioning the enemy, which can leave him ineffective for longer than we’d like.

In short, the aim is for Yoru to have better tools to trick opponents, a stronger baseline value across his kit, and higher impact per round. But what does this all look like? Please consider everything below a work in progress and not final change notes.

IT GO RIGHT FOOT UP, LEFT FOOT FAKEOUT

The first ability to look at is Fakeout, the footsteps decoy that drove a lot of the deceptive plays that we loved to see. To help with Yoru’s mind games, we’ve decided to replace the footsteps with a new visual: a carbon copy of Yoru that runs forward, and upon getting shot, will wind up and explode, debuffing enemies.

BLACK LEATHER GLOVES, NEW SEQUENCE

With Gatecrash, we’ve lowered the range at which enemies can see and hear the tether on the map while it travels. We’ve also increased its travel speed by 20%. In addition to these quality of life improvements, Yoru can now activate the tether from a distance to trigger a fake teleport, playing the same audio and visuals as if he were teleporting.

EITHER WAY, WE ‘BOUT TO DRIFT

We're not ready to share all the changes we're testing internally on Yoru right now, but we're confident our rework will help unlock Yoru's potential. This may include testing a few changes to Dimensional Drift help Yoru break sites wide open.

THE NEXT UPDATE

Although we’re confident these changes will help Yoru get to a better state, when he drops early next year, we’ll continue to monitor them to ensure we can quickly make adjustments accordingly. I know you’ve been waiting, but we hope you all end up having as much fun as we’ve had with Yoru (internally) and I’m stoked to see everything you can soon teach us about Yoru and his fresh gear.

Thank you for sticking with us through this journey, we hope this visibility helps bridge the gap between now, and when he (re)launches. We'll post probably just one more of these Yoru specials before his rework drops early next year. In that article, expect to see art updates that go into supporting these changes.