Riot shows off Project L, the League of Legends fighting game
Seems the plan is coming together
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Following Riot’s debut on Netflix with Arcane, an animated show set in the world of League of Legends and the launch of two new games that take the most played MOBA in the world to different genres, the company posted a new trailer for their upcoming fighting game, Project L.
Announced around the same time as Valorant – a first-person-shooter, akin to Counter-Strike – as part of Riot’s push to bring more games out, set in their fictional world of Runeterra, the game went dark for just over a year as the studio worked on the game. Headed by fighting game veterans Tony and Tom Cannon, twins who created the EVO fighting game tournament, they are bringing League of Legends characters to a traditional tag-team fighting game.
Characters shown in the trailer included the protagonist of Arcane, Jinx, as well as a redesigned Ekko, Ahri and Darius.
Tony Cannon is also the developer of the middleware program GGPO, a piece of software that allows for ‘rollback’, where the system predicts your next input and will literally roll back the game’s state to ensure smoother experiences on both sides. It was created in response to the 2006 release of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, which had a generally bad netcode for players used to local play.
The software was more recently used in the latest Guilty Gear and Melty Blood games.
Riot’s intention with Project L is to provide an easy-to-pick-up, but hard to master game. Controls will provide an environment for anyone to be able to play, yet still, be rewarding for those that put in the time. From the video, there didn’t really appear to be any directional inputs like quarter-circles being utilised, making it more reminiscent of the alternate control modes from games like Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, which changed inputs to single directions and button presses to perform more complex moves.
The goal is to give players who are just learning the game something to ‘aspire’ to, as those who master the game show off their skills.
Riot has confirmed that the game will not release until after 2022 and there will be two more updates in the second half of 2022 showing off more of the game. Meanwhile, Netflix has confirmed that Arcane will receive a Season 2.
