Collaboration events play a pretty big role in video games these days, especially free-to-play live service games. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not always the best thing either. Basically it comes down to one of two things. Either the collaboration needs to be designed to fit the universe – which I think is more important, especially in games with a lot of backstory, or it needs to be a game based solely on collaboration.

Fortnite is a good example of the latter. It may not have originally been intended for constant collaboration, but that’s definitely something it’s now known for. And to be fair, they found a way to adapt it to their lore, which is why they brought the TARDIS from Doctor Who and two of the Stellaron Hunters from Honkai: Trilho Estelar.

This brings us to an example of the other type of games: the lore-heavy ones. The Honkai-verse is very story-driven and a lot of time has been invested in world building. No entanto, there are some crossovers in the game. One somehow brought Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn to Genshin Impact. I’m sure this was great for fans of Aloy, but it just felt weird. So even though she’s a free five-star character, she’s still on my list.

Then there’s the Fate Stay/Night crossover in Honkai: Trilho Estelar. This feels a little more natural than Genshin’s, partly because Teyvat is a more or less closed world, while Star Rail’s universe is so open that Elio keeps sending Blade on side quests to other universes. It also helped that the Fate collaboration that gave us two playable characters included a story quest that tied them to the Honkai-verse. It’s an objectively better system, even if feelings about the story itself may vary.

A game manufacturer avoids all associated problems in the simplest way. Jogos de motim, the developer of League of Legends and Valorant, is simply forgoing any collaborations at all. Even third-party skins are avoided.

Recentemente, League of Legends lead designer August Browning addressed this on a stream while answering player questions when someone asked about third-party skins. The stream was clipped and shared on YouTube by HeWhoQuacksss and subsequently shared in an article by Mollie Taylor on PC Gamer.

According to Browning, Riot doesn’t think much of collaborations. He told the viewer that the company was “pretty much not open to it.” If you’re wondering why, it’s pretty simple: they feel like bringing in things like third-party skins “completely changes” the tone of the game.

It’s not a wrong feeling. Na verdade, working with One Punch Man was one of the reasons I skipped Crystal of Atlan. It just felt weird. Basically it just depends on what the developers want to achieve with their game. If we’re talking about Fortnite, I don’t think it’s a problem. Even Final Fantasy’s upcoming Evangelion raid After all, Final Fantasy was already collaborating before anyone had even thought of Fortnite. They turned this into a pretty solid series of games with Kingdom Hearts. The Nier raids in XIV were pretty good too.