League Classic sneak peek Showmatch receives mixed reactions

Seventeen years after the initial release of the game, League Classic is finally here after much anticipation and multiple cease-and-desisted projects and… people are not liking it?! Indeed, despite the excitement surrounding the project when it first leaked on social media and was subsequently revealed, the latest live demo showmatch during the 2026 Mid-Season Invitational finals led to a rather mixed reception on community sites like Twitter and Reddit, with one point of criticism echoing above the rest.

Built on the modern League engine, League Classic most likely had to undergo months of work and rebuilding to make sure that it would work with the current technology behind the Season 2026 version of League of Legends. This unfortunately means a lot of manual labor porting old champions and kits back to the new engine, as well as having to rig old models anew. With those difficulties, shortcuts were taken, something that fans were quick to notice and complain about…

From the get-go, it was no secret that League Classic would not simply take a snapshot of years past and let users play it as it was, as this is simply not possible due to major backend changes over the years and the large turnover of employees throughout time. No, League Classic was always going to be a separate game mode made from old remastered textures and hours of scouring the wiki to find the numbers of old kits to be reproduced.

With this, everyone expected many champions that maybe did not exist at the same time to play alongside one another in slightly different ways. What people did not expect, however, was that some champions, like Kassadin or Alistar in the MSI Showmatch, would be played with their reworked models that came much later on. On top of this, the same champions use old splash arts dating back to before their models were reworked, leading to a weird disconnect between what the game sells you in the loading screen and what you actually see in-game.

A potential issue is that players seemingly are allowed to use any skins they have unlocked through normal League in Classic, meaning that a champion that came out in 2009 could very well be played with a 2026 skin, completely dismissing the original idea behind Classic. Instead, they can be served an Elderwood Karthus skin, or a reworked Battlecast Skarner with modern textures and a modern model, turning League Classic into just a custom map skin with some altered items.

In the end, skins in particular prove to be a real issue. As modes have often been made in correlation with skin sales, like Odyssey, Star Guardian, or even the Dark Star Thresh mini-game mode in the past, League Classic in some ways had to feature ways to promote League’s monetization. As users commented: “Riot won't take away skins you can or have paid for; they won't shoot themselves in the foot,” a sentiment that is not surprising to members of the community but still nevertheless disappointing.

Expecting Riot to fully port every old League skin and model was always an unrealistic task, as it would have represented a gigantic workload to make the mode work. This left them with two options: either use current base League skins or fully remove skins from the game if they were not made for pre-rework models.

Unfortunately, this now seems to be the major point of friction leading to the overall reactions surrounding the mode. In a post where LoL Esports jokingly posted about Paul "sOAZ" Boyer using Moo Cow Alistar and hitting his bell, most responses instead flamed Riot for allowing this to even happen.

For now, it seems unlikely that Riot will go back on its original plan and make major changes before launch, with the mode set to release on July 29th. However, League Classic is expected to remain available for an extended period of time, with Riot planning to update the mode and add more champions through community votes.

That being said, if the community response remains loud enough — especially once players get their hands on the mode at release — Riot could still make changes down the line…