Project L, the upcoming League of Legends "assist-based fighter," has received a brand-new gameplay deep dive that shows much more of the upcoming game set in Runeterra.
Project L was originally announced in 2019, and Riot Games' Tom and Tony Cannon stopped by Undercity Nights to show the progress the team has made. They were careful to say that this gameplay clip is a "vertical slice" that was built 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."
Tom & @Pond3r reintroduce Project L, an assist-based fighter set in the world of Runeterra. 👊🏽💥💥
Learn More: https://t.co/hg4xAQ8RJV pic.twitter.com/TDVQn2kasR
— Riot Games #RiotXArcane 💥 (@riotgames) November 20, 2021
While this may look like a polished demo, Tom confirmed the game would not be shipping in either 2021 or 2022, and that the team still has plenty of work to do until it's ready to be released into the world.
"Our goal is to build a super high-quality fighting game that the FGC can invest deeply in, playing for years or even decades," Tom said. "That takes time to get right, and we’re not going to rush it."
Despite that, a lot more was revealed about Project L, including that it will be a "tag-team style fighting game, where you'll build and pilot a team of two different champions." Additionally, the art style has been updated and they walked players through a "breakdown of a champion's kit."
The controls are extremely important in Project L, and Riot is developing them with "an easy-to-learn but hard-to-master mentality." Another big focus for the team is the netcode, as it wants Project L to have "the absolute best" a fighting game can have.
"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," Tom explained. "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."
Riot isn't quite ready to give a proper release date or window for the game besides saying it won't arrive this year or next, but it has confirmed that it is "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."
It will be some time before we hear more about Project L, as Tom shared that we won't hear from them again until "sometime early in the second half of 2022." This will be part of their plan to "commit to AT LEAST two updates next year."
For more from the world of Runeterra, check out the official announcement of a Season 2 for the League of Legends animated series Arcane and Riot's denial regarding the rumor that Project L would reward players with NFTs.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.