After more than two years of deadly silence, Riot Games has finally brought the unusual Project L fighting game for League of Legends back into the spotlight.

Riot Games last showed off Project L in October 2019, but it was still in the research and development (R&D) phase at the time. Still, now senior director and executive producer Tom Cannon says in a blog post, “we’ve landed in a spot that we’re all pretty excited about. The gameplay clip that we aired [today] at Undercity Nights [back in October 2019] is still what the gaming industry calls a ‘vertical slice,'” Cannon explained in a blog post. “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 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,” Cannon said. He admitted that Riot’s goal is to create “a super high-quality fighting game that the fighting game community can invest deeply in, playing for years or even decades.”

Project L will be an assist-based, tag-team (e.g. Tekken Tag Team Tournament) fighting game, so you’ll have to team up two champions. It will be easy to learn but challenging to master at a professional level and will have a rollback-based netcode, which will be implemented using Riot Games technology (e.g. RiotDirect) to minimise ping.

According to Cannon, “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 user interfaces, 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.”

Riot Games will release more details about Project L (featuring Ekko, Darius, Ahri and Jinx so far) early in the second half of 2022 (July-August). Still, after that, the company owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent will drop more details at least once more. The game will be on consoles, too.

Source: Gematsu