Project L will be headed to EVO 2023 this year to show off more of the League of Legends fighting game, Riot Games announced this week. Talked about only seldomly by fighting game aficionados and the game’s creators and shown off even more infrequently, Project L’s EVO 2023 announcement from this week was also finally accompanied by another gameplay preview that showed off a new mechanic: 2v2 fights. That’s not new to fighting games overall, but the format will work a bit different in Project L in that it blends 2v2 fights with the tag-in gameplay seen in other fighting game series.
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In a video shared on Wednesday, Project L’s core rules designer Daniel “Clockwork” Maniago and game director Shaun Rivera talked about how the 2v2 matchups will work. The game also supports 1v1 and 2v1 setups, too, if you’d prefer to take control of both champions by yourself.
“Duo play works a bit like tag team wrestling. One player controls the champ on stage and the other waits offscreen for their teammate to find the right moment to tag them in,” Rivera said. “In our last update, we showcased some of our tag mechanics, all of which were designed from the ground up to encourage teamwork sharing in victories, defeats, performing combos together or saving your partner in a clutch moment are just some of the new ways you can experience the game as a duo. Project L will support 1v1, 2v2, and even 2v1 matchups. So don’t worry solo players, you can still play as a solo tag team fighter and control both champs at once.”
A separate video featuring more Project L developers was also shared to show what a full match played in this 2v2 format would look like.
Of course, a setup like this does raise some questions: What’s in place to ensure someone actually gets to play instead of sitting on the sidelines the whole time? The two champions on one team have different healthbars, and when one’s knocked out, the other enters, so that’s at least one part of that question answered. A demo of the game will be playable at EVO hopefully with more information to be shared by the devs there, so perhaps we’ll have more of those questions answered next week.
