Project L is FINALLY here, it feels like forever since we’ve waited for any updates and announcements on this title. On Saturday, Nov. 20, Riot Games unveiled a new look at Project L in a six minute presentation covering gameplay and networking. Revealed at Evolution 2019, Project L is Riot’s newest League of Legends fighting game developed in-house at Riot Games with Tony and Tom Canon, founders of Evolution, as heads of the title. Project L is still in early development, but has since progressed from when it was first shown off.

Project L will be an assist based, tag team fighter in a similar style as Marvel vs. Capcom and staying true to League of Legends core gameplay. Project L will have an “easy to learn, hard to master” mentality which will focus on player enjoyability and overall fun of the game with simple to learn mechanics while also focusing on competitive play with a steadily increasing difficulty curve. With an easy to play mentality in mind, the goal for Project L is to build a game that unlocks the fun at all skills. That being said, Project L will be a two button fighter with specials and command normals set to a designated button similar to Power Rangers: Battle for The Grid. So far, only five characters have been revealed: Ahri, Darius, Ekko, Katarina, and Jinx have been showcased although in this presentation Ahri, Darius, and Ekko were shown off. Tony and Tom Canon have worked closely with Riot to create simple, yet accurate designs and gameplay for these characters to work in a fighting game. Visually, Project L has transformed into a beautiful looking fighting game taking inspiration from Arc System Works’ rendering and League of Legends’ artstyle.

Let’s talk about netcode: fighting game netcode has become an extremely important topic within the fighting game community as, historically, most fighting games have had bad, inconsistent netcode that can ruin player enjoyability online. And with the current pandemic still thriving, offline competition has yet to come back. But have no fear because Tony Canon has confirmed rollback netcode implementation in Project L with a new networking model and Riot Direct: Riot’s packet of cables and routers used for League of Legends and Valorant. Tony Canon, for those who don’t know, was the leading figure in trying to correct fighting games online which led to the creation of GGPO (Good Games Peace Out) and rollback netcode. In simple terms, rollback netcode is when players run simulations of the game state at the same time, practically in-sync. If both players hit inputs at the same time, the game will read the inputs at which they were hit and the game simulation will rollback and resimulate everything to the current game state. 

It’s not just a great time to be a Riot fan, but it’s also a great time to be a fighting game fan as new fighting games are being announced and released more than before. Project L looks like a step in the right direction for the fighting game community and it’s exciting to see more updates and announcements come in the future. Currently, Project L is being scheduled for a 2021 or 2022 release.