TFT dev Noëmi Couté reveals the design process behind Set 17

A look into TFT's nebulous design process

Teamfight Tactics (TFT), Riot Games' auto battler, is returning to space, and this time you’ll encounter fantastical beings who seek your favor. In just its sixth year, TFT will be releasing its 17th set, which is its version of a live-service game "season." Each set is distinct from the last and those before it. With Set 17, officially titled Space Gods, the Teamfight Tactics development team takes another big swing by replacing a fundamental game mechanic: the Carousel.

The Carousel has been a staple to TFT since the game's inception, and acted as a way for low-health players to catch up to their competition. Taking its place is the Realm of the Gods, a marketplace where celestial deities will provide you with rewards in hopes of your following. While the Realm of the Gods may seem like a simple one-to-one replacement for the Carousel, it may turn out to be one of the biggest changes in the game's recent history.

Ahead of the launch of Set 17, I spoke with set design lead Noëmi Couté over a video call to discuss the development process and the upcoming changes.

"I view the set mechanic as one of the biggest experiments we've ever had," Couté said. "In order for TFT to remain at the forefront of auto battlers and the genre and remain relevant, we have to push novelty. And the only way we can push novelty is by experimenting like this."

Novelty is an issue that all live-service games encounter. Keeping a game fresh and engaging enough for a playerbase to continue playing is no easy task. Couté related it to a "content treadmill."

"We're constantly trying to find more, and the more you make, the harder it becomes," she explained. In TFT's case, this has become a slightly bigger hurdle than usual, as its update cadence pivoted to three full sets a year in 2024, rather than two sets with a mid-set update.

However, the TFT development team has been successful in producing novel concepts. In just this past set, Lore and Legends, the new Unlocks mechanic quickly became a fan favorite, but this posed another problem that many of us have faced at one point in our lives.

Imagine that you're back in school at the young age of six years old and it's time for the Science Fair. Sixteen of your classmates have given their presentations and you're up next. However, the person before you put on a masterful lockpicking show where they unlocked 40 locks using bobby pins, hooks, rakes, and even farfetched tools like a drill and a soda can. Their demonstration captivated the audience to the point that they wanted them to keep going, but alas, it's your turn. You bring up your project that you've worked on for months, a model rocket with an intricate propulsion system hidden inside and a beautifully painted diorama of the stars.

The rocket functions as any model rocket should, but the audience only sees it from the outside, a regular papier-mâché spaceship. Fortunately, I was able to hear more about the design process and the rocket's desired destination: the Moon.

"I had this idea for what I was calling a ‘carousel bazaar’ and I wanted … a Choncc shop, a Pengu shop, and maybe Shadow Pengu shows up," said Couté. "I wanted this kind of social experience where players can come to the Carousel, shop for what they want, see everybody moving around shopping between different vendors."

Unfortunately, due to constraints, the idea had to be scaled back. "It turns out that with our tech, that was really hard to do in the time that we had and really hard to execute because there were a lot of fundamental systems that it touched," Couté said. "We tried things like putting augments into the system. That didn't go over very well. Part of it was change aversion. Part of it was it's a really core system on top of another really core system … so we started realizing that in order to do this, it might be change aversion, but it was like too much too fast. So we really pulled things back and simplified it a lot."

This led to the team testing a myriad of changes. They experimented with the removal of the Carousel, adjustments to the comeback mechanic, and even the round structure, which was quickly shut down by the finalization team. Couté said, "I was like, 'Oh, we are in fact messing with fundamental systems that are causing problems with our more engaged players.' And on one hand, we were like, 'But we kind of like it when the game isn't solved and we're forcing you to play in a new way and learn how to play the game.' But we don't want to cause so much friction that those players are like, 'I don't want to relearn the game. I'm going to play something else.' Striking that balance was very, very difficult on such a short timeline."

Instead, the developers opted for a more simple approach. They took the core of the gods, their captivating illustrations, and the overall interaction to create the Realm of the Gods.

"I think the system has a lot of potential," Couté said. "I would personally love to take another stab at this once we have data on what people liked, what people didn't like, and a bit more time to actually flesh out the more complicated version of what we wanted."

While the TFT development team might've missed their initial aspirations of the Moon, as a player since Set 1 PBE, I appreciate a dev team that is willing to take these kinds of risks that "challenge their assumptions," as Couté puts it. We will see the return of the Carousel in Set 18, but, as we've seen previous mechanics evolve over time (like Galaxies in Set 3 and Augments in Set 6), there's potential for the Realm of the Gods to grow — and lead this model rocket to land among the stars.