League of Legends is an expansive and intriguing universe and its characters are one of the main reasons people still love the franchise to this day. With such an immersive roster all with unique backstories, lore, and abilities, combining them all into one setting without diluting any of its characters is pretty remarkable.
One such character is Ekko, known as ‘The Boy Who Shattered Time’ who’s gotten a lot of love recently with his appearance in the extremely popular ‘Arcane’ Netflix show and a spin-off platforming game “CONVERGENCE: A League of Legends Story” featuring Ekko released in 2023.
In retrospect, Ekko should be one of the most insanely overpowered characters in the universe since he can literally manipulate time to his will.
No matter how strong a champion is, in reality, if they were to go against this masterful time assassin, he’d be a tough opponent to beat. Well, unless you’re a planet-eating God or transcend space and time itself.
Among mortals at least, he’s a force to be reckoned with.
But here comes another bit of lore you might not have known about the gruff time shatterer; he almost got one of the most broken ultimates to ever exist in League of Legends history.
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What Ekko Could Have Been
This comes from a TikTok from Riot August, one of the lead designers for League of Legends in response to a fan asking:
“What is something you wish you could do in League, but just realistically wouldn’t work?”
Riot August then goes on to explain that while certain aspects of a character may be ‘thematically relevant’, they still need to account for how it would affect the game at large.
He mentions that since it’s a PvP game, Riot devs have to “account for the fact that those mechanics will be leveraged against other players”.
So even though it might make sense canonically, it could be a disaster if players use them in ways that could ‘break’ the game. Riot August then mentions one example of a character they tried to incorporate an accurate depiction of the character’s powers but to a dismal unintended consequence.
And it was for none other than Ekko.
During the design process of the Ekko character, they already knew “Ekko was gonna be a time assassin” says August.
Keeping to the theme of time manipulation, one of the early adaptations of Ekko had an ultimate that could rewind the “entire game”.
“The way it worked was Ekko would hit his ultimate and throw the entire map into the timestream for eight seconds,” August mentions.
They would keep a record of all relevant statistics for all players in the game including skill cooldowns, their health at the time, and position. After Ekko procs his ultimate, eight seconds later all players would rewind to their ‘original state’.
The only exception to the rewind was death, so players could openly engage in team fights without worry unless they died.
However, as cool as it could have been, August says the ultimate was “very game-warping”.
Eventually, the idea was shot down after a QA tester spoke to August and said “If you ship this ultimate, I will ban Ekko in every game I see him in regardless of whose team he’s on”.
But thematically, it makes sense if you think about Ekko’s powers. Technically, he could do this if wanted to but in a MOBA like League of Legends, it’s hard to fathom one character being able to so openly disregard almost every rule in the book.
Plus, let’s be real, it would be straight chaos if any champion in League could pull off something as game-breaking as this absurd ultimate. But it sure as hell would’ve been fun.
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