Project L /dev: Finding our Game

Hey everyone, Tom here from the team working on the League of Legends fighter, codenamed Project L. It’s been a while! How have you been?

Our initial reveal back in 2019 showed a potential direction that we could take the game. But Project L is in R&D: the phase of game development where we’re exploring options and finding the fun. Today, our explorations have borne fruit, and we’ve landed in a spot that we’re all pretty excited about! So now felt like a great moment to bring you up to speed, especially with all the Undercity Nights festivities happening across Riot.

Before we get into the details, a quick clarification: the gameplay clip that we aired at Undercity Nights is still what the gaming industry calls a ‘vertical slice.’ We built this to hammer out the final look of the game, in advance of actually going in and building all of our content like characters and stages. Our vertical slice might give you the sense that the game is ready, but we actually still have a lot of work ahead of us. So, although we’ve made a great deal of progress, we will not be shipping in 2021 or 2022.

Our goal is to build a super high-quality fighting game that the FGC can invest deeply in, playing for years or even decades. That takes time to get right, and we’re not going to rush it. 

We’re excited to share that Project L will be a tag-team style fighting game, where you’ll build and pilot a team of two different champions. In this preview, you’ll see we’ve updated the game’s art style and included a breakdown of a champion’s kit. You’ll catch a glimpse of how we’re approaching controls with an easy-to-learn but hard-to-master mentality. 

We also talk a little about one of our top priorities for the game: to build the absolute best in netcode that you can get in a fighter. 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 minimizing ping for League of Legends and VALORANT.

So when will you get to play? Well we’re almost locked in on the stuff that makes a game a game (core gameplay, controls, art direction, etc.) but we still need to do things like build out a full roster of champions, design stages, add menus and UI, create ranking systems, and more.

To get all this done, we’re still looking for some additional Rioters to join the team! Check out our hiring page if you want to help us get Project L over the finish line.

Last time we talked we said we’d be going dark, but this time around we’re going to commit to AT LEAST two updates next year. You’ll hear from us again sometime early in the second half of 2022. GG until then.