With a new set around the corner and more players returning to the game, Teamfight Tactics (TFT) continues to evolve with every patch. I sat down with Game Director Peter Whalen during GDC to talk about accessibility, experimentation, and how TFT keeps its identity while chasing new ideas with every set. If you’re someone who’s bounced off before or is just waiting for the right moment to return, there’s a lot happening in TFT Set 14’s Cyber City that might pull you back in.

BUT WHY THO: As a kind of newcomer or for a returning player to Teamfight Tactics, what do you think has made the game last for as long as it has?

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PETER WHALEN: Yeah. I think Teamfight Tactics is a uniquely accessible game. One of the things that’s really nice about it is that you just pick a bunch of champions, you put them on the board, and they’re just gonna fight. You get to basically have a League of Legends team fight play out for you without you doing all of the work of mastering every champion.

I’ve seen kids playing Teamfight Tactics, and I play with my 4-year-old, who loves it. So just being able to get guys out there and have this fight that looks really awesome has been very powerful for getting people into the game. And then as you progress, there are tons of deep strategies you can learn. Lots of ways you can get better at it and master the game—that’s helped people stick around for a long time.

BUT WHY THO: Yeah, sounds good. I haven’t played in a long time—mainly because there are so many auto-battlers out now, and it’s hard to keep up with all the changes. So how are you bringing people back, especially those who haven’t played in maybe a year or more? 

PETER WHALEN: We release new sets—those are our big content drops. Every four months, there’s a new TFT set, and we replace all the champions. We keep the core mechanics the same, but the entire theme gets swapped out. Right now, we’re coming out with TFT Set 14, which is Cyber City. It’s our new near-future theme with different factions fighting in a cyber-tech city. We’re really excited about it, and it’s launching in just a couple of weeks.

BUT WHY THO: As you develop these new sets, how do you decide where to go thematically or lore-wise? 

PETER WHALEN: We look at TFT as a playground. You can take all of these League champions and set them up to tell your own stories. It’s like kids in a sandbox playing with action figures—you’re telling your version of a League story.

When you look at something like Into the Arcane, that set is much closer to the core lore of Runeterra. It was based on the show we did with Netflix. Before that, you had Remix Rumble, which was all music-themed. And now we’re going to Cyber City.

So as we’re planning the different set themes, we try to make sure there’s a lot of variation—going from magical mayhem to something darker like Into the Arcane, to something bright and neon like Cyber City.  And then we’ve got more stuff in the future that we’re excited about. So it’s really making sure that we have that variation between the different types of content so that there’s something for everybody.

With ever-changing sets, League of Legends Champions always gets to explore new aesthetics and worlds.

BUT WHY THO: And when you’re building those sets and pulling from the roster of champions, is that mostly player feedback or more based on what fits thematically?

PETER WHALEN: It’s a mix. We definitely survey players to understand what genres and mechanics they like or don’t like. We also get tons of feedback from the community—our devs talk directly with players all the time. But at the same time, we have to be excited as a team. People just need to be inspired artistically—like “this is the direction we want to go.”

It also depends on what cool mechanics we want to introduce. Like with Into the Arcane, we had the anomaly mechanic.  When we’re going to Cyber City, we’ve got hacks as our new mechanic where stuff just gets changed. One of my favorite ones is a moment during the game where you pick your augments, where you’ll pick one power-up for you. With Cyber City, sometimes they get hacked. You can pick two lesser augments or one more powerful augment, which one do you want?

BUT WHY THO: I always find it interesting—when you introduce a new mechanic like Hacks, what does that teach you as a dev team? How do you evaluate it?

PETER WHALEN: Coming up with the mechanic is probably the hardest part. It has to play well with all the core TFT systems but also feel fresh.

With Into the Arcane, anomaly was meant to be a small mechanic—it just supercharged one champion for one round—but it ended up being really popular. The fantasy of powering up a single champion just worked. Then you’ve got more persistent things like the charms in Set 12, which showed up in your shop and added small effects over time.

Now with Cyber City, hacks affect your whole experience. Your shop can get hacked. Your augments can get hacked. Basically anything can get hacked. It’s a got wide breadth, but each hack has a lower impact each time it happens.

BUT WHY THO: When I hear “random hack,” my brain goes straight to RNG frustration. Especially for competitive players—how do you balance that?

PETER WHALEN: It’s random, but it’s fair. Hacks happen randomly, but they’re the same for everyone in the lobby. It’s not like you’re the only one getting hacked.

And usually, hacks make you stronger or better in someway.  But it’ll happen symmetrically for everybody in the lobby, but game over game it’s gonna be really different.

BUT WHY THO: So how’s the competitive side growing? You’ve got kids playing, but you’ve also got a pretty sweaty top-tier scene now.

PETER WHALEN: Yeah, the esports scene has definitely evolved. Our esports philosophy is play-first. A lot of esports are watch-first—focused on watching pros on consistent teams backed by sponsors.  TFT is really focused on making sure that any player with sufficient skill can go from their couch to the world championship in a single set. All you have to do is just win a lot.

We just wrapped our Set 13 championship for Into the Arcane, and it was awesome. Before that, we did the TFT Macau Open, which is a mix of invitational and open players—anyone high on the ladder can qualify. It’s a huge event with dev panels, photo ops, new product showcases. It’s more than just esports—it’s a celebration of the game. We did Vegas the year before, Macau last year, and Paris is up next.

Teamfight Tactics is a gateway to the League of Legends universe.

BUT WHY THO:  What about TFT do you think lets new fans who may not be familiar with Riot come into it for the first time?

PETER WHALEN: There are two things.  So one is that we’re able to use a wide variety of themes that people might just be able to associate with.  If you have an affinity for any kind of genre, it’s really easy to then step into that TFT set.

Second, for Riot fans, TFT lets you experience champions in ways you never could in the core games. One of my favorite data stories: in Set 9, even though Garen and Katarina had no synergy, players kept putting them together in the same comp because they shipped them.  And so being able to tell that story and having that be like 10% of our player base blew my mind. I think that’s a really cool way that people are able to express themselves within the game.

BUT WHY THO:  What would you recommend to players who are trying to get back into it—who want to be more technical but don’t want to spend time watching their favorite players?

PETER WHALEN: Come play Tocker’s Trials. Tocker’s Trials is the new mode that we added. We launched it with Set 12, then at the start of Into the Arcane, and now we’re gonna do it again for Cyber City. It is a PVE mode—so you’re gonna fight only against fixed enemy comps, and it’s a perfect way to explore the set. You’re gonna fight against the same comps every time, but you’ll be using all of the new set mechanics, all the new set champions, all of the new set augments.

And so it’s a great way to explore, to really get familiar with it. It counts for all of your quest progress, so you can get battle pass progress. I actually have played lots of games of Tocker’s Trials just because it’s a fun thing that you can do over a longer period of time.

If I’m putting my kids to bed, it’s something I can do where it’s really easy to get interrupted. You can just play. And so it’s a safe place to explore the new set.

It’s also a great place to play if you’re just doing something like watching Netflix and playing TFT. It’s a really good game mode for that. And then once you feel confident with Tocker’s Trials—hey, you’ve beaten it five times, the enemy encounters don’t change—go and play against other players.

BUT WHY THO: In Tocker’s Trials, is there a way to know which builds work best?

If you wanna get good comps from other players, we’ve got Team Planner—one of the features we added in the last year or so. You can just download codes from other players, like your favorite streamer or whatever, and import them into Team Planner.

You’ll be able to see that comp during your game. You can also ask it to highlight those units in your shop. So let’s say robinsongz is your favorite streamer—you can just download one of his comps, load it up, hit “show me these units in game,” and it’ll highlight them as you roll through the shop.

BUT WHY THO: Expression is huge in games like this. Are you adding more modes for that? Or are the four-month sets enough?

PETER WHALEN: Yeah, TFT does a bunch of events, so we have other modes. Double Up is getting some major improvements coming up in the next two or three weeks—I think there’s some big updates planned for that.

Double Up is a pretty popular way to play with two people together. It’s four teams of two instead of eight solo players. We also do a bunch of event content. We’ve been doing more events than ever before. Choncc’s Treasures was one of our most popular—it’s that supercharge mode where you just get a whole bunch of extra gold and access to more resources.

There’s Pengu Party, which we did for our anniversary last year. That was really popular too. It was a mode where you got to build weird team comps using traits from the past. You could pick old traits from whatever it was—ten or eleven past sets—and apply them to current units in the new set. So you could build some wild comps. That one went over really well.

We’ve also started bringing back old sets, which players have liked—often with a twist. For example, we brought back Set 4.5 which was fates and added in some new stuff, like the augment system. That’s been really popular.

Having the ability to release these kinds of events has been huge for our players, and we want to keep investing in this space. We’ve got some crazy and cool events planned for this year and next.

TFT Set 14 moves your favorite Champions into the Cyberpunk genre, and adapting them is a unique kind of creative freedom.

BUT WHY THO: When you drop these characters into new genres, what’s the thought process behind that? And what’s your dream genre to explore in a future set?

PETER WHALEN: I think it’s that we get to see our League champions in a new light, which is really fun. One of the things we always talk about is that TFT isn’t canon, but we stay true to the characters.

So when we take these champions into a cyberpunk world, a magic school setting, ink-born fables, or the music-verse, we ask ourselves: What would Morgana do in this space? What would Ahri do when she’s here?  So, we put them in these weird situations that obviously would never actually happen in Runeterra.

But we want to understand—what would that character do? It’s what lets us explore characters’ personalities in ways that you just can’t in the normal situations that they encounter. I think putting characters in extreme situations can help us learn more about them and be able to explore them in fun ways.

For me personally, one of my favorite thematics is prehistoric—dinosaurs. I don’t know how popular that set would be, or if we even have the champions to pull it off. There’s not, like, a lot of dinosaur League of Legends champions. But I love all of that space of the dinosaur world.

BUT WHY THO: How do you feel balancing it all has been, especially when you’re trying to balance casual players but also trying to balance a very competitive scene? 

PETER WHALEN: Balance is tricky. It’s a place that we invest a lot of resources to try and make sure the set is as good as possible. Over the last couple of years, we’ve changed some stuff systematically in the backend to make it easier for us to playtest a lot.

And then also, we’ve added what we call a finalization team, which is made up of some very top-end pro players, along with some competitively-leaning designers, who come into every set for several months to help make sure it’s in the position we need it to be, balance-wise.

We’ve also started working on sets even farther out than we have in the past. We’re now working on them something like a year or more in advance, so that we have enough time for things to be pretty final by the time this finalization team comes in and really cleans things up. That way, we can have as balanced—and fun—a launch meta.

One of the other things I think about with balance a lot—you mentioned balancing for more casual players—is that balancing for super-competitive players is really just balancing for fun. It’s really important that what we get at the end still has lots of that zaniness, that wackiness, and those really high moments, while also being fair for players to compete in.

We talk sometimes about sanding off too many of the rough edges. And if your set is so balanced that everything’s exactly the same, there’s just no spark anymore.

So it’s really important to us that we keep that spark—that you still have those high moments and those really fun dreams to pursue—while also making sure it’s a fair game, where you feel like you’re progressing skill-wise, that you can really master it, and that your skill actually matters.

There is always a time to come back to TFT, your moment just may be Cyber City.

BUT WHY THO: I really do believe that whenever we go through a creative process, whenever we make something, we put a little bit of ourselves into it. But it also teaches us a bit about ourselves too. So, what have you learned about yourself as a developer working on TFT?

PETER WHALEN: I think the biggest takeaway that I’ve had is how valuable trying new things is—one of the things that TFT really excels at as a game is having a broad design canvas. There are so many different things we can try, and being willing to take risks is so critical—because we have the set process, and sets only last for four months.

It’s okay when things go away. Being able to take big swings, try things out, and then—if it’s terrible—it’s actually gonna be okay. It’ll go away in a couple of months. Plus, we have lots of opportunities to tweak things. And our players tend to forgive us.

For somebody like you who says, “Hey, I’m a TFT player, but I haven’t played in a year,” there’s still a good chance we’ll find a set that really resonates with you. And I’m optimistic that we can bring you back.

So yeah—being able to try things out, and if they fail, so be it. If they succeed, that’s wonderful. That’s one of the things I’ve really learned working on TFT: just the value of taking risks, having a place that’s safe enough to do it, a canvas that’s broad enough to really have space to play, and a willingness to try things that are going to be fun.

Whether you’re a lapsed player waiting for the right hook or a curious newcomer peeking in for the first time, Set 14’s Cyber City feels like a confident step forward for Teamfight Tactics. With new mechanics like hacks, modes like Tocker’s Trials, and a clear commitment to making the game more accessible without sacrificing depth, TFT continues to evolve.

TFT set 14 is clearly keeping the game fresh, expressive, and fun. After talking with Peter Whalen, it’s clear the team isn’t just building sets—they’re building stories, systems, and spaces for all kinds of players to jump in, experiment, and maybe even stick around for the next one.

Teamfight Tactics Set 14, Cyber City, will be live on April 2, 2025.

This Interview Was Edited for Length and Clarity.