Frokat
In a competitive ranked environment, the players’ ability to access their replays is often as important as the gaming experience itself. Whether you’re in it to relive a star highlight and acquire some bragging rights to flex on your friends, or a mistakes review for personal growth if you’re that committed, we can all agree that replays are a core part of what makes competitive gaming feel as rewarding as it does now.
If you’re here because of Riot’s most recent animated series, Arcane, this short guide might be of great use to you. League of Legends is a very complex games with – without exaggeration – millions of things to learn, and what a better way to learn there is other than watching the things you’re interested in?
Being the pioneers of accessible replay systems, Riot Games have poured a lot of effort in making the replays easily accessible by the player base. However, even the most well-oiled machine can sometimes go wrong – especially if it’s oiled with spaghetti. Fear not, however – the solution is always there! Well, almost always.
Accessing replays via the League client
Simple and intuitive, the built-in replay system offers an easy to navigate menu. The players have an option to download and store replays for all the matches that are showing in their match history – and once the matches are no longer there, you can still access them, but that’s for later! You can easily access it the following way:
Enter your Profile in the menu
This is the main hub for all the information related to your League of Legends journey. There’s way more to look at than just the Match History and your Replays, but we gotta keep this guide short!
Select Match History
Improved and perfected over the years, League’s match history offers detailed information about your most recent games. However, the dry data and graphs can only get you so far – watching the real thing is way better if you wish to learn new things and fix your mistakes.
Download the Replay of the match you want
These steps are pretty much self explanatory. There’s a reason why League is considered to have the best replay system on the market.
The download itself is pretty short no matter the game length. Thankfully, the game doesn’t download an entire recording of the match, just a set of instructions to “re-play” the game. Which makes the replays stored on your PC light as a feather!
Once you’re done, the replay is yours to keep forever. Even if the match you’ve just downloaded is no longer visible in your match history, you can still access it from your PC. Or, alternatively, you can record the particular moment you wish to see (and brag about) using the client’s Highlight feature.
The Highlights
Highlights is sort of a replay inside of a replay type of thing. Once you’re watching the replay, you can record the segment you want by clicking the red button on the time controls segment, or by pressing Ctrl+V hotkeys.
Once you’re done, press it again to save the highlight. Now it’s here forever – and even other people who check your profile can see it!
The alternative way
League client makes it pretty easy to see your matches, and its intuitive design is not a hurdle to understand. However, sometimes it is not enough. If you want to download a replay from outside your own games (like, say, a replay of an official esports league match), or a replay of a professional player from a third-party website (like OP.GG), you’ll have to use another way. Or, sometimes, League built-in replay system is known for being wonky when a new patch rolls out – I’ve experienced it myself this week when the client simply refused to record my match history, leaving out five or so matches as if they never even happened!
Find the Replays folder
In these cases, you’ll have to go outside the box – literally! League of Legends replays are stored in Documents >League of Legends > Replays by default, using a pretty interesting file extension name of ROFL.
Obviously, if you’ve downloaded the replay from somewhere else, you’ll have to locate it in your Downloads directory.
Locate the League Client folder
Once the file is here, you’ll have to access it. I’ve found that the most convenient way to do so is the following:
Locate the folder with your League client. By default, the path should look something like this: Disk Name > Riot Games > League of Legends. Look for the LeagueClient.exe.
Get watching!
For the sake of convenience, we’ll make a shortcut for it, and drag it to your Desktop for quick access.
Once you’re done, you can easily open ROFL files by simply dragging them on top of the League Client shortcut. If done properly, this is what you’ll see once you do that, indicating that this file can be opened this way. Remember that knowledge is power, and now you have enough power to go around!
Last but not least, there are other, more elegant ways to access replays you want. If you wish to see high level gameplay of a champion you’d like to learn, third-party apps like Porofessor offer an easy-to-navigate interface to find just the match for you. If you’d like to learn more about third-party apps for a better learning experience, we’ve got you covered!