- Riot Games has released a new video regarding its fighter game Project L
- Two of the project leads spoke about the game’s core gameplay aspects and the challenges of keeping champions’ identity
- They added that Project L will have a priority of ensuring a robust network to support competitive play
Riot Games has broken the silence and has revealed more details about the Project L Runeterra-based fighter game, including some fresh footage.
Riot Talks About Project L
Despite Riot Games announcing its fighter game, titled Project L, two years ago, the company has been sparing in news regarding the project. However, now a big update has dropped, featuring more gameplay footage and interview with the project leads.
Project L will be an assist-based 2-dimensional fighter game that takes inspiration from some of the biggest titles in the genre. It will once again bring players to the beloved world of Runeterra and re-experience their favorite characters in a different way. The assist system will let players select two characters per game, allowing them to make unique combinations and switch attacks in crucial moments to gain an advantage over their opponents.
Tom Cannon, the executive producer of Project L, and Tony Cannon, the technical lead, spoke about the controls of the game. They said that they are going for an “easy to learn, hard to master” style of game that everyone can pick up and get comfortable with but still has a long learning curve that allows the game to be played at a professional level.
Tom Cannon explained that despite its easy control scheme, Project L doesn’t strive to be a game where new players can easily beat pros but rather a title that aims to “unlock the fun at all skill levels.”
The Champions Will Retain Their Unique Flavor
Since Project L is set in the Runeterra universe, there are quite some expectations coming along with it. After all, players are used to the League of Legend characters and want them to retain their personalities. That’s why Project L has taken on the responsible task of readapting champions’ moveset for a fighter game format.
In the promotional video, the project leads featured the time-manipulating champion Ekko. Just like in League of Legends, Ekko will retain his signature time-related abilities, this time adapted for the fighter genre. For example, some of Ekko’s moves will create afterimages that will serve as “bookmarks” he can turn time back to. This will allow for intensive and strategy-rich gameplay and choice-making. Additionally, Ekko will be armed with his well-known Timewinder grenade. In Project L it will serve as a ranged attack that slows down an opponent for a short time.
The Project L team will use the same design philosophy for translating the rest of the beloved League of Legends champions to the new title.
Project L Will Work on a Robust Network to Support Fair Competition
Lastly, the Project L leads spoke about Riot’s ambition of ensuring flawless connectivity between competing players. The Cannons shared that Riot Games is investing a lot of resources in Project L’s net code and will strive to “deliver the same highly-responsible gameplay” that one gets from playing offline.
Tony Cannon said that that rollback networking is the core of Riot’s solution to maintaining a “consistent, low-input delay across a wide range of pings. Cannon added that the team has developed a new networking model that enhances the benefits of rollback with core technology from other Riot games.
Player traffic will be routed through Riot Direct – the company’s internal network that is already being used to minimize latency in League of Legends. Tony Cannon explained that the game will prioritize fair play so if a player’s internet connection is bad, their experience will suffer but the other player’s experience won’t. The tech lead pointed out that netplay is something that Riot is taking very seriously
“It’s the primary way we playtest the game internally and we are working every day to make sure it is in top shape for the eventual release,” Cannon said.
The team concluded that Project L is still far from being finished but the Cannon brothers promised that there will not be a shortage of news like there was in the past two years.
Riot is simultaneously working on an MMORPG title but even less is known about it, at least at the point of this writing.
