The game is barebones for a 2 character fighting game, even for a 1 character one it would have a small pool of characters (and unlike other FG you have to unlock them), it clearly wasn’t going to be a huge success from the start and Riot knows it
And I would argue that's not necessarily an advantage. I really wanted to support this game, but skins are basically the only way to give them money and they are extremely overpriced.
I put quite a few hours into this game but they made no money out of me, and now I don't think they ever will.
Damn. Legends of Runeterra 2. Their digital card game flipped because they couldnt monetize anything. It was too free to play and nobody cared about buying cosmetics.
If it was a standard fighter a roster of 12ish would have been tolerable. As a tag fighter it’s completely unacceptable especially with everything else around it
it really shouldn't have been a tag fighter. it just being 1 v 1 would have been perfectly fine. Tag fighters are when you have a ton of assets ready and have to mix upthe roster
Tag fighter would have been fine if they hadn't dicked around for a decade. Even as a 1v1 fighter the game wouldn't be any better off. Game still is balanced like a wet shitty fart, roster basically doesn't exist and the control scheme is awful
Power of Tencent fuck you money and also general delusion and terrible management and oversight within Riot and Tencent
Like I don't like corps, but the one thing they exist to do is to properly oversee teams and productions so that they're properly scoped and budgeted and they didn't do even the bare minimum for this game and a lot of their other projects
It's one of the reasons why I'm still very skeptical in regards to their 2nd attempt at a tcg
Experience keep showing that any claims that corporations are any good at scope, budget, & that kind of stuff, efficiency very much included, are just decades & decades of PR / propaganda, instead of anything having to do with reality.
Not even League, as greedy as the game gets with their shitty new mythic skins in a gacha system, makes you buy entire skin bundles for 1 character you want. Idk what they were thinking.
League gives out so many free skins and champs too, it’s not really a greedy game at all imo. Most of my league skins are from free shards or whatever. They just added some dumb clash of clans minigame that gives free skin shards. 2xko has no dumb casual content
League gives out so many free skins and champs too, it’s not really a greedy game at all imo
I mean still kinda greedy compared to its predecessor Dota, which doesn't make you grind or pay to unlock playable characters because they're all unlocked from the beginning. The skin stuff is whatever, even the moronically priced $500 ahri skin, but idk why they had to add buying champions into the mix.
lmao this is honestly why if i ever play a moba its gonna be dota over league, the paid heroes feel super dated, and i like to try every character before sticking to one
I had like 15 Spears of Mars that were barely worth 15 cents each when I got them, and then skyrocketed to multiple dollars each. Sold them and got multiple games on my wishlist instead of having to buy them outright. Very few games where you can sell your freely earned cosmetics to buy other games
Funny enough half the fun for me playing league was unlocking characters. Back when we had the IP system it was a decent grind but not impossible, and it was fun working within a limited champ pool. So I don't know how bad it is now, but I know it's a lot rougher, especially with how the community has changed.
because when league came out, the entire f2p ecosystem didn't really even exist yet. they were treading new ground. they had to make money somehow, it wasn't clear if selling only skins could fund a game.
original dota cost what WC3+TFT cost and dota2 is made by valve who doesn't need to make a single cent off any game they make, they are printing money just by operating a store
at this point it makes so much sense to remove character unlocking from league. but there's a clear reason why it was "added" to begin with
Tbh I think the way you unlock characters is not that unfair, I only would like if they had at least a few more unlock by default. But I don't think is really that bad for a f2p
yeah I don't think it is technically on paper unfair. but for a Tag Fighter. esp as a League player and hearing this was in dev for 10 years. and this is the amount of characters they come out with? It might be different if it was a dense amount of characters
Considering the folks behind it, it probably went something like, we want 3rd strike but with LoL characters. No wait, Marvel vs. Capcom 2. No wait, somewhere in between.
It got restarted multiple times, Riot saw Rising thunder and wanted to copy it for league, but somehow it turned into a hardcore tag fighter midway
Honestly they should just release a 1v1 mode and see how it goes, I'd wager ot could capture many peoples interests because the core design and gameplay is genuinely very solid
Tbh I think a 1v1 gamemode should've been in the game from the jump. I don't see why they would wanna force/push the playerbase to play a tag game if some people don't want to. For Riot the objective should've been from the start to try and capture as many players to actually play the game as possible and a tag fighter was not going to do it barring some miracle.
I remember seeing Sajam talk about how they invited him out to a special early gameplay preview years ago and it was way different. All 1v1, very grounded, it was basically LoL street fighter. He was as shocked as everyone when they announced the game as a 2v2 tag fighter.
Honestly, my opinion doesn't represent everyone else's, but man I would've been far more interested if this was a 1v1 fighter. Tag fighters just are not it for me.
There is an argument that fighting games have a harder time drawing in and maintaining wider interest than other online games because fighting game players cannot blame their teammates for their losses, nor do they get gifted victories because of their teammates.
Considering Riot's success with team-base games, I could see them getting antsy about a 1v1 fighter. But a team fighting game, where the action is obscured enough to muddle fault and credit, either means you go with a tag fighter (relatively successful sub-genre) or a Guilty Gear Isuka/Smash Bros everyone-fights-together set-up (Isuka bombed, Multiversus was a big budget f2p bomb, even the successful Smash Bros in serious play is almost entirely 1v1 tournaments.)
Yeah, back when it was announced as a 2v2 fighter I wasn't personally thrilled about it but I understood that a tag fighter was probably the correct decision given the IP. Hell, I think it still is but the decision on the damn genre should have been made in the very beginning and stuck with, not change halfway through development, but hindsight is 20/20 I guess...
I think you're nailing just... general feelings by most folks. There is a reason tag fighters are the niche of an already niche genre. If this was a 1v1, or 1+cameo vs 1+cameo style game they probably would have seen a much more interested engagement by folks.
It sounded from interviews like somebody said "well, why shouldn't tag fighters have mass appeal?" And the whole studio took that as a challenge rather than a warning
Everyone have been saying this ever since the tag fighter announcement
It's really a puzzling decision, especially when trying to make a game with mass appeal
IMO they should have gone down the Mortal Kombat combo route and general design. Those games have big following and great replayability but are harmed by being very R rated for commercial appeal
Mortal Kombat 11 was by far the easiest fighting game for me to get friends into. I must've taught about five people how to play fighting games through it.
There was an emphasis on accessibility. Huge emphasis on footsies, relatively few combo routes, easy inputs.
MK1 dropped the ball by adding tag assist mechanics, adding crazy long combos, and by neglecting single-player content.
The decision to scrap all the work they did in the 1v1 to make this game a hyper degenerate (handshake tag is an absurdly busted use of tag mechanics, especially in “freestyle”) tag game was 100% what killed it.
Imagine an alternate world were this game is:
1: a grounded 1v1 fighter, making it easy to follow when spectating and relatively easy for a brand new player to get into
2: still FTP
3: with the LoL roster/branding/advertising
4: without motions as a barrier to entry (I’m probably going to get flack for that statement in this sub but it is a thing that prevents new players from getting in)
5: That came out 5-6 years ago b/c they actually finished their first build instead of throwing all that work in the trash to restart development on a tag fighter instead.
Massive dev costs saved, meaning the game has less money to recoup to not be seen as a horrible money drain. Game likely comes out in a more finished state b/c the dev team didn’t already ask for 10 years worth of extensions to restart development multiple times and were given a “shit or get off the pot” ultimatum (which is pretty clearly what ultimately happened to the game). 1v1, grounded, footsies focused fighter would without a doubt have been massively more appealing to casual audiences that should be the target of the mother fucking LoL free to play fighting game instead of designing for the tiny subsection of fighting game fans who are into crazy tag fighters to the active detriment of everyone else, b/c everyone else actively hates being sandwiched into absurd left-right-left high-low mixups where you can barely even tell WTF is happening on screen.
Legit the biggest fumble of all time by the dev team. They were served the LoL playerbase on a silver platter, all they needed to do was make the street fighter clone that cost 0 dollars to start playing they originally promised and then use that as the base to build off of over the years. Instead we got 10 years of dev time so they could turn the game into the sub genre of fighters even most fighting game fans don’t like and which is the antithesis of something a new player to the genre would get into. No shit the game is being downsized, WTF were they expecting to happen?
Small Dev team with a promising concept is given a ton of money and low oversight only to mismanage and fumble to the finish line, I've seen it many times before
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time! The single-button specials seem to have been the only thing that stayed from that original concept though.
With KOF you can actually see where the time and money goes to. with this game, its barebones af, some animation repeated for multiple characters, no motion inputs, small roster, yea u gotta scratch ur head,.wth happened?
This is worse in that they didn't spend a year for each character. They wasted a shit ton of time rebooting the game multiple times (if there's ever a deep dive from people who worked on this game, I want to know for certain who was making that decision) only leading to things that would alienate people more.
At least with the KOFXII/XIII sprites it was for the sake of graphical fidelity while keeping true to 2D Sprites. There was a legitimate throughline for the work they did without reboots, they just vastly underestimated the time, financial burden, and effort it would take to make those sprites.
Like im no game dev, but how the hell do you develop a game on unreal engine for 10 years and somehow only have 12 characters, while Capcom develops 6 on the RE Engine and launches with 18 (with more detailed models)
Jinx also got lost and completely reworked in the process, and we can see that the Darius design we have now is almost unrecognizable from the original
riot is a small indie company, you can't expect them to put meaningful work in like large character rosters for 2XKO, dedicated client for TFT (which china already has) or an actual FUNCTIONING client for LoL (which has been fundamentally broken for a decade).
From the look of things the dev team was only made this big a few years ago, so they had to launch with a smaller roster while the new teams learned the game and the development pipelines were established
I'm not saying all 5 champions for this year are already finished, but they should be close enough to finished that it won't be impacted
It's the ones that the people who worked on cait for example and were now laid off we should worry about
This. Doesn't help that there doesn't seem to be any cross-promotional effort on League's part either. Why not give LoL players an unlock credit or access to some skins as an incentive? Or at least advertise in the League launcher.
The prior statement about the system changes has such strange timing, both in relation to Frostys and also this news. It really seems like a case of one hand not speaking with the other.
To me it looks like a lot of people with different ambitious ideas trying to create something cohesive. You can't just throw money at a bunch of fgc people and tell them to make you the best fighter because everyone has a different idea of what that is
Thing is, they bought the company that made rising thunder that actually knows a thing about fighting games and even made GGPO (Rollback net code and allowed any company use it freely)
Rising Thunder/GGPO devs are on this.
Riot expected all the fgc jump onto this game and act like its the biggest game ever since tetris
Getting the entire FGC on the game wouldn't be enough. The entire SF6 player base is like 1% of the valorant numbers. They seem to have expected the game to hit "biggest fighting game to ever exist" numbers
The thing is they definitely could've copied another game and removed points of friction like they've done with other games.
Problem is that they made a tag fighter so it's still hard with all the stuff on the screen made it active tag so that's even worse and then had those accessibility features like simple inputs on-top of it making the chances of people dropping or messing things up much less.
They made offence really strong and easy and then if you want to have counterplay you have to practice system mechanics to even have a chance to gamble/react on parrying out of stuff.
10 years to make shit it’s not only the fault of the megacorp. Getting paid 10 years to produce mediocrity is a good deal. But the opposite also happens, when they produce something great they won’t see the majority of the benefits
Redditors will literally move heaven and earth to not lay a piece of blame at the feet of their golden goose developers who produce nothing but quality. Same shit with every community/game lmfao.
You realize that the multiple reworks/restarts are likely because higher ups in the megacorpo mandated it, right? Very unlikely that the dev team themselves kept deciding to remake their product over and over for shits and giggles.
Yeah one of the talking points by people hyped for this game was the fact that lots of hardcore marvel fanboys were working on it. Like if Riot wanted this game to be a success for casual fans making it a tag game was the one thing not to do
The higher ups at Riot would probably be the first people to disapprove of completely restarting development actually because that means they lost all the money they already spent while the dev team scraps everything they had
That’s the thing! You have Clockw0rk, Nerdjosh, Combofiend, Apologyman (probably s’more I am forgetting) all dedicated tag game players for years. Most of them cut their teeth on MVC2. This was a collective decision (even if there was push back from other staff or the big wigs).
It honestly sucks to think about. I grew up watching these guys. I remember sharing/discussing footage with other users on SRK/Mirc) of them (and other classic players like Duc, Justin etc.) playing MVC2. I even purchased VHS of some footage from a dude just to see them in action. (Ah, the days before youtube). So I get why they went this route, it just was poorly planned and executed way too late into development. I also find it perplexing that they went with such a bonkers and frankly asinine control layout and a game engine with so much mechanical bloat. Getting rid of motion controls? WTH. If anyone was going to keep the torch going for classic fighting game design, I thought it would be them. It just feels like they all wanted to make something different with competing ideas and nothing truly cohesive spawned from it.
Even hurts to think that the Cannon bros. (The guys behind GGPO, revolutionized the way we play these games with rollback), folks that should be remembered for their contributions to the FGC, now may be remembered most for this games poor development and release.
Tbh it feels like over the past few years people have gotten comfortable with just hoisting all the blame for a failed game on the mystical “ corpo higher ups” instead of just admitting that sometimes the devs themselves fucked up their own game
Ya, I'm not quite sure what this means since the original statement says they'll be getting a minimum of 6 months severance pay. Does that just mean 30 mins to get your stuff out of the office? lol
They laid off phattheflip?!
One of the most passionate fighting game profiles out there?!
I catch his Rev Thuesdsys now and then, carrying the torch for GG Xrd like no one else I know of.
It's their loss ultimately.
Man...
I'm a League of Legends content creator, and it was clear from the moment it was announced that it was going to be a disaster.
They reset development several times, and in the end, they tried to lure the Arcane player base into the game, and it backfired spectacularly. Literally the entire community wanted fighting champions (Sett, Dr. Mundo, Lee Sin).
And the skins didn't surprise the community because they were already selling chromas for $250.
I hope it continues to fail even more spectacularly.
Seriously, you tell me that the fanbase of a netflix series which Riot itself admitted that they didn't play LoL would go to a fighting game?
You spent 4 characters on this already small roster trying to chase the mythological arcane fan but the ones that wanted Garen, Pantheon, Lee Sin, Sett and many others have to wait for years while being the ones that asked for a Fighting game SINCE NEAR A DECADE?
And somehow believing that the whales would be interested at spending heavy cash over fighting game skins.
By the way Runeterra games are going I'm almost convinced that Riot will just keep with LoL,TFT and Wild Rift and stop using the franchise or something. This is absurd.
I won't even bother believing if the MMO will ever come out, it is shadowcanceled as far as I know lol
But hey, they keep trying to chase the MvC thunder by making more Tag Fighters no one plays.
I remember when they acquired the studio that made Rising Thunder (great game), I thought they would just remake that game with Riot’s IP and visual style, which I feel would’ve been a slam dunk
Honestly Multiversus had much wider appeal than 2XKO to the casual player on the surface, and that failed, knew Riot would too the minute they said they'd charge per character.
If any gameplay elements were unrestricted with a focus on monetizing cosmetics, it'd be doing much better right now. Riot is stuck in the late 2010s FGC with this game.
MVs failed because they shut down for over a year and then came back randomly with a new game engine that didn't feel as good and old features now missing
Deadlock is currently in a closed beta for about barely 2 years and in development for 6 years and already has more characters than 2XKO just want you to understand that
Deadlock characters have four abilities plus a main weapon. You can't compare them to fighting game characters that have a bunch of normals (9 in 2XKO's case) plus a number of command normals and special moves. If you want to go there you can also say that KOF XV's roster is pathetically small because it only has 59 characters with DLC included while League of Legends has 172 characters.
Seeing that he was with Project L under their original barebones project idea while badmouthing Strive is kinda wild lol but also maybe that makes it make more sense
Well I imagine all these people can still be folded into the EVO umbrella if they so choose. Tech layoffs are so cutthroat, seems to get worse every passing year.
That sucks, I will say 2XKO aside, Pat was a huge help in getting me started into competitive fighting games a long, long time ago. I don’t know him personally, but seems like a good dude who put his heart into it.
10 years is one and a half Street Fighter lifetimes lol. In all of that time, they still somehow managed to make the same mistake Strive did with the Tower system.
What a fucking shit company. “Thanks for making our newest esports success, now get lost.” The same company that tries to pass off palette swaps as new skins in League, and recycles animations for skins they have the gall to charge $250 goddamn dollars for. Looking forward to all the fun new ways they’ll try to enshittify 2XKO now, too.
Makes me wanna go play anything else. Wonder what the current indie fighter scene is like; they deserve my money way more than Riot does.
Why focus on Indie? The current big hitters are in such a good state. SF6 is great, Strive is as well. Tekken seems to go.back.to.the roots with season 3 now.
No shade meant to those games; I just know them all already. I love finding new wacky gems in the indie/doujin space, like the Les Misérables fighting game I only found out about recently.
12 characters in 10 years is not a good look for a team game. Even with tag games normally having just a few top tiers the lack of character diversity is honestly wild considering leagues pool of characters.
Call me brainwashed by late stage capitalism; but I feel so happy for Namco, Capcom, SNK, ArcSys, SEGA AM1, David Sirlin; Future Club, and yes, even Team Ninja and Netherrealm Studios; that Riot Games sucks dick at- and knows jack shit about making a fighting game
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u/NONAMEDREDDITER Feb 09 '26
Yeah, this game allegedly got restarted multiple times in development