Household franchises like Tekken and Street Fighter will always be around to release new entries, but the fighting game genre could always use some fresh IP and this is where Project L is coming in. Project L is a new free-to-play 2D tag fighting game set in the world of League of Legends (Runeterra). It’s being developed by Riot Games and the team has just shown off a new developer diary with a longer look at gameplay.
In the new developer diary, Tom Cannon and Shauna Rivera walk us through the gameplay and tag features that are in the game. Tom Cannon is the executive producer of Project L, while Rivera is the gameplay director. At the beginning of the video, Cannon shows off some early gameplay of Illaoi, who was revealed to be coming to Project L a few months ago. Her gameplay makes use of brawler-style attacks and longer-range tentacle-based attacks. Cannon notes that she is about 30% complete from a development standpoint.
Project L is a 2v2 tag fighting game with assist mechanics. The video starts by talking about the variety of movement mechanics available to players. Players will be able to jump, long jump, super jump, walk, run, dash, and chain dash during gameplay. Some characters also have additional movement abilities in the air.
The video then covers the assist mechanics in Project L. Assist Actions let your secondary character appear on screen to execute one of two potential attacks before returning. Handshake Tag can let players swap between their two characters when both are on screen, and it can be combined with Assist Actions for a longer combo. Finally, Dynamic Save tags one character out for another and acts as a combo breaker that gets you out of tough situations. The team stressed that the names of these mechanics may change before the final release.
Fans of Riot Games will have noticed that the gameplay features looks at Jinx, Ekko, Darius, and Ahri. Since Project L is based on the world of League of Legends, we can expect that more characters from that universe will make the final roster of this fighting game.
Tom Cannon and Tony Cannon are the leads on this project. They are famous for creating the Evolution Championship Series (EVO) tournament. More recently, they are famous for creating rollback netcode (GGPO), which is a system being used to significantly reduce latency in the online portions of fighting games. At the end of the video, Tom Cannon discusses how Project L is being built with the needs of EVO and its community in mind.
Project L does not yet have a confirmed release date. Considering the history of Riot Games, it will likely launch on PC when it does release.
