Riot Games announced it will be ending active development of its free-to-play fighting game 2XKO.
The peculiarly-named fighting game based on the world of Runeterra (i.e. League Of Legends, Arcane) will have its final content update this October which will the last two champions, Lux and Samira. A patch for bug fixes is planned to release in December. And that will be all she wrote for 2XKO.
Fortunately, Riot Games will be keeping the 2XKO servers live so online play will still be possible as long as they are willing to keep it so. There’s no more Ranked matchmaking, as the online pool will now be consolidated into one, though casual matchmaking will still match players of similar skill level. Offline play will be available.
But that’s not all, Riot is also refunding all money spent on 2XKO before or on August 20, the date of this announcement. All champs will be unlocked, all live service elements (battle pass, seasons, events) are removed. Instead of paying for champs and cosmetics through KO Points, there will now be an optional cosmetic bundle which includes all cosmetics released so far for a flat rate, with some items now unlockable using the in-game currency, Credits.
Development of 2XKO can be traced as far back as ten years ago, when Riot acquired Radiant Entertainment, the team behind Rising Thunder. That game had potential, including the idea of a simplified special move inputs that only require a button press rather than doing technical inputs that only seasoned fighting game players are familiar with.
The new game, for the longest time referred as Project L, was teased here and there until it was revealed that it has an unexpected name, and is also a 2V2 tag fighter where you can optionally play as a two-player team. The game effectively soft-launched as a closed beta test on PC which rolled into a full release on consoles without much fanfare outside of the fighting game community. Admittedly, we at Gamer Matters also missed the release announcement news.
In the blog post announcing this, Riot Game admitted it faced problems where players outside of the diehard tag fighter fans “struggled to find reasons to stick with the game.” Ten years removed from the revolutionary idea of simplified inputs that it has since become ubiquitous in most modern fighting games, the problem of getting new players to play fighjting game remains. And we have some ideas of what other fighting game devs might need to look next.
While Riot Games’ exploration into the fighting game genre ends on a sad note, it did found gold with Valorant, its take on a competitive tactical shooter to rival Counter-Strike with a hero-shooter twist.
Despite its end of active development 2XKO remains playable on PC and consoles as a free download.