Here's your first proper look at Project L, the League of Legends fighting game
It's been a long time since we first heard about Riot's mysterious fighting game, Project L, so enjoy this new deep dive
Way back in 2019, we heard about three myterious Riot projects codenamed Project A, Project F, and Project L.
The first ('a stylish competitive tactical shooter for PC') it turns out, was Valorant. The second, "a project that explores the possibilities of traversing the world of Runeterra with your friends," has yet to be formally unveiled. And the last, a fighting game set within the League of Legends universe, finally got a new showing over the weekend.
In a new video (above) showing off what we can expect from the game, lead developers at Riot, Tom and Tony Cannon, went into detail about the team’s design philosophy with the game.
The fighting game's main conceit is that it will be an "assist-based fighter", where you're tasked with developing a team of two players and using the one that's off-screen to support in the battle between the two current fighters.
There's also a blog post by the devs that details the team's intent with the game, wherein the studio notes that the aim is for the game to give players an “easy-to-learn but hard-to-master mentality” and create “a super high-quality fighting game that the FGC (fighting game community) can invest deeply in, playing for years or even decades.”
To that end, and to appeal to the competitive players out there, the team is looking into how to make the online experience the best it can be. "Of course, we’re starting with rollback as a foundation, and we’re adding in existing tech from Riot like RiotDirect, which does a great job at minimising ping for League Of Legends and Valorant," says Tom Cannon.Just don't expect to get your hands on it any time soon; Riot says it's "still too far out to commit to a release date," and this video was shared primarily as a way of the developer keeping fans up to date with how development is going.
Earlier this month, we heard that over 180 million players are jumping into one of Riot's Runeterra games every month.