League of Legends is a well-known game throughout the parts of the world with its massive e-sports scene pulling hundreds and millions of people to play and watch. In fact, in 2020, their player base was somewhere estimated to be somewhere in the range of 100 to 120 million active players, and on Twitch, the streaming platform for those who want to play video game and share it with others, is still pulling views from all over the globe. With the game’s massive success over the globe, naturally, the company would try to make a spin-off of the game to make contact with other fans of different genres. That is where the project series comes in. Project A is a shooter base that had been released called Valorant although the other projects, L and F, haven’t been released yet. However, recently, Riot had just sent out news about letting people join to test the untitled Project L for feedback.
It is no surprise that the fighting game genre has a hard time holding the attention of a casual fanbase. They are far less popular than the more popular genres, such as first-person shooter, sports, and many more. Most of the time, to attract a large casual player to a fighting game, they must look appealing to them, or they could attract them by creating a game through the existing popular universe. That is what Riot’s Project L is: a fighting game based on the popular game League of Legends with their own created cast members and their universe.
Currently, Project L is being created, handled, and taken care of by Tom Cannon, the co-founder of EVO. There is very little information on what the game would be like, but there is a small amount of information we have been given. One, the game would be very similar to the canceled game Rising Thunder, a game that was specially built for new players to jump right in without having any trouble. This game was very beginner-friendly, and Project L will take after this format. Not only that, it has been confirmed from the trailer footage that 4 characters will be in there: Ahri, Darius, Jinx, and Katarina. We still don’t know the entire cast lineup, but the possibility is endless since League of Legends possessed 150 champions total to pick from and is still growing to this day.
The reason why Project L is such an exciting upcoming game is due to the mass amount of new players and fans of League of Legends that will be pulled into the community. Similar to how Dragon Ball FighterZ, based on the iconic and famous Dragon Ball, the game that united the world together while also breaking records of fighting games at the same time. If Project L is released, then it would most likely create another surge inviting new players and veterans of the fighting game community to try out the game.
Anna Bauman, a support player on the League of Legends team on the Greenville E-sports team, said, “I don’t know what Project L is. However, I think this is great since they are trying to reach different fans who enjoy different genres. It’s very cool that the developer put out the beta test game for their audience to see if they like it or not.”
There’s a lot that we don’t know about the game yet, but it leaves us with so many questions. The game has a bright future ahead of itself, and not only will it able to expand the fighting game community as a whole, but it will help to put fighting game on the mainstream media for everyone.
Media by Minh La.
Nice. I play all of Riot’s Runeterra-based games and didn’t even know they were working on this!