Riot Games’ upcoming League of Legends fighting game 2XKO launches in early access next week.
Riot Games is primed to finally launch its upcoming League of Legends fighting game 2XKO, with one small caveat: it’s only launching in early access. The game’s ongoing closed beta will transition into early access on 7 October, 2025, with an all-new fighter in the ever-controversial Champion Teemo.
We caught up with Shaun 'Unconkable' Rivera at Tokyo Game Show 2025 over the weekend. The game director and gameplay design lead of 2XKO at Riot Games was more than happy to talk to us about the state of the game as it enters early access, Katarina’s disappearance from the fighting roster, and his personal favourite League of Legends champion.
Note: the following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GosuGamers: 2XKO’s early access launch was just announced this week! How is the team feeling about the release? Excited? Daunted?
Rivera: Oh, we're super pumped, you know. This will be the first moment where, unlike Closed Beta, where you need a code to get in, you can just download the game, free-to-play, jump in, grab a friend, and check it out. Super pumped.
GosuGamers: With 2XKO’s tag system and Fuses, a lot of the discourse surrounding this beta has centered on its difficulty for players to master. Is that something the team is keeping an eye on, or perhaps even intended?
Rivera: We definitely want to give you a little depth, a little something to chew on, but I think we also want it to be really easy to find the fun quickly. That's why we don't have motion inputs. We have simple button inputs. You press our special one and two and you'll see something really spectacular and fun happen. So it's easy to get in there, hit buttons, and have fun.
Also, we want to make it easy to learn, in the sense that you can just bring a friend in and play together in dual play. So even when you lose, that's fun. Especially having the banter of like, "Yo, we finished that sick combo, that was sick." Or like, "Hey, why didn't you break for me? Why didn't you protect me there?" It's a very unique experience and another fun way to bring somebody on.
Once you learn a champion or two, and you kind of want to have your own playstyle or way to play the game, that's where the Fuse system comes in. So for example, we have like, Juggernaut, where you can pick, you know, just focus on one champion, you don't have to switch out, and just focus on learning that single character. That's for you. We have Sidekick for players who told us, "I wish I could just play a support role." Like, "I want to come in from off screen and help out occasionally, but I don't want to be the main character."
We've made that Fuse for that reason, and we have a bunch of other ones that let you explore how the champs fight together in various ways. But a lot to dig into. We really want to have discoverable depth though, through just playing the game.
GosuGamers: Another object of discourse has been how slim the game’s starting roster is at launch, albeit in early access. With 10 characters for players to mix and match, why do an early access launch now instead of waiting until later?
Rivera: Of course, we're looking to increase. With the 10 we have, we really want to make sure that there's enough diversity of themes, how they look, how they act, what they're wearing, etc. And also diversity of mechanics, so that you can find the champ that you really like and start your journey there.
We're definitely going to have a lot more champs coming out. You know, like you mentioned, we'll have a new one (Teemo) in early access, so please look forward to more information soon. Can't wait for you all to try them. And then we also announced that in 2026, we're going to have five seasons. And in each season we're going to have a new champion. So that's five new champions for our next year. So very excited for you all to see what we got cooking there.
GosuGamers: Are there any specific Legends you’re keen on including in the game eventually?
Rivera: Oh, boy. So people have asked me this and they also pair it with, like: "Hey, what's your favorite champion?" My favorite champion is Malzahar. I really like the fact that Malzahar is like the herald of the void, creates these voidlings, has the Malefic Visions action. It's just a very fun champion for you to play in the MOBA. And imagining how that would play in a fighting game is very interesting.
But as far as upcoming champions I want to see, let me flip that on you. What champions do you want to see in the game?
GosuGamers, pointing to a nearby poster of Blitzcrank: It’s already in there!
Rivera: Blitzcrank? Oh, let's go! That's sick. You got to hit the Rocket Grab. It's just too fun, right?
GosuGamers: Is Katarina still coming to the game in the near future? If so, could you share a rough time window for fans?
Rivera: Katarina was a champ that was shown off very, very early in development. And she was one where we just used basically like her as a test bed to try out different systems and mechanics, right?
When we switched to a team game, that version of her would not fit in the team game, and also really wouldn't do her fans justice. We decided that we're not going to move forward with that one. So, she's not in development. You know, we're not working on her. But if the time comes that we do work on her, we want to make sure that we do justice to the players that love Katarina.
I'm one of those players. I love Katarina too.
GosuGamers: How are you approaching the challenge of adapting League of Legends champions—who come from such a different genre—into a fighting game roster?
Rivera: I mean, we're still figuring that out. I can give you some info though. One, I'm super, super impressed with the job the team's done in bringing these characters to life in ways that only a fighting game can. It's very challenging.
Sometimes there's a mechanic or theme fans might like about the champion, but we also want to elevate the fantasy, right? What are cool things that you've never seen them do before, that they could definitely do, when you see them do it in a way only a fighting game can deliver on.
Also, some mechanics from the MOBA don't translate very well to a fighting game. So the MOBA has a lot of boomerang attacks to clear waves of creeps. If everybody has a bunch of boomerangs, it's like, you know, really tough to deal with in a fighting game. The MOBA also has a lot of CC, right? You know, we don't want everybody getting stunned all over. It's not that fun, right? We have to be really careful in how we like to deliver on those. Like an example is Ari, where like in League of Legends, she has her charm where she throws the heart at you, right?
That's her ultimate in our game. When you activate her ultimate, she throws the heart and if it hits, you see the cool cinematic. But that's not like a base special move on her kit. So you have to get creative in where and how these things show up.
GosuGamers: What core experience do you want players to feel the first time they pick up 2XKO?
Rivera: Oh, it's Duo Play for sure. Grab a friend, play on a team together, and give it a try. You know, for me, it was a pretty transformative experience to play duos with my co-workers, with my friends. As you play more, you start to realize there's this synergy building up. You're like, "Oh, okay, I'm getting used to what my partner is doing, right?" And then now all of a sudden, you don't have to say anything to each other. You're locked in and it's an amazing feeling that fighting games really haven't delivered in a while.
It’s also just fun to banter with a friend when you're playing. Like, you know, “Hey, you better not drop that combo next time," or "You better save me this time," you know, and vice versa. It can make the whole experience feel really fun and good. I definitely recommend giving it a try.
GosuGamers: Why did you choose a 2v2 tag-team format as the foundation for the game instead of a traditional 1v1 fighter?
Rivera: When we had the Riot Games 10-year anniversary and Project L (2XKO’s former codename) was shown to the world, it was a 1v1 game then. We play tested with players and asked them, "Hey, how is this game?" And they said, "You know, it's okay.” But nobody ever wants to hear “it's okay."
We're making the game, and we want it to be exciting. So, we took it back to the drawing board. Something that came up was that games are just so much more fun to play with a friend. We thought, what if instead of a side mode, we really built this game from the ground up to be competitive when you're playing with your friend. In the League of Legends IP and the MOBA, when champs fight together, that's really sick. It's a really cool experience. And we thought we could bring that kind of fighting together with synergy into a fighting game. It could be really unique and novel.
However, when we built dual play, we ran into a problem. Like, what if you and I are duelling and you can't come tomorrow night? What can I do? I just don’t get to play the game? Do I have to find a stranger to play with, or another friend?
So, of course we want to introduce solo play, where you're by yourself and you control both champions. Then from there, another problem came up, where it's like, if I start dual play with you, but tomorrow I want to try solo play for the first time, if the controls are really different, it's actually hard. Once we worked hard to make the controls similar across modes, we realised, hey, it's not just 2v2, it could be solo versus duo. It could be solo versus solo, duo versus duo. So two, three, four friends, you can all play the game and have a good time and that's really exciting.
GosuGamers: Can you share how you’re involving the community in shaping the game during its development?
Rivera: Yeah, absolutely. One of Riot’s strengths is that the company really encourages us to talk to players. We actually really like that, chatting with people on socials. We're also looking at data, we're looking at surveys and we're watching people play as well. We're taking all that in, but then we don't just make a change from there and try to improve it. We communicate our intent.
We just dropped our first set of patch notes and players had a lot of different opinions about them and we thought it was great. We learned that we could’ve been clearer about certain intents and how we do patchnotes. It's just about an open communication between us and players, what we're hearing, making sure they feel heard, and making sure that we're improving the game over time because we want to be around forever.
GosuGamers: Among all the characters you've added to the roster so far, which do you think was the most interesting to develop?
Rivera: I think that would depend on who you ask. I bet every team that worked on each of their champs would say “our champs are most interesting to develop.” I think like for any one of our champs, the goal, like I said before, is we want you to be able to find the fun right away. So right as you touch the champ, you can do some cool stuff, but we also want there to be this discoverable depth just through playing the game over time.
As you play more, you learn specific combos or setups, and I think that is really satisfying. That's something that our entire team pours into each and every champ. So I don't have a particular one, unfortunately. I think they're all sick.
GosuGamers How does the team go about picking and choosing the game’s specific playable fighters?
Rivera: Yeah, so as we talked about roster before, we think 10 is a bit small for a team game. So that's why we're going to work to get a bunch out later next month and then also in the following years, right? We want mechanical and thematic diversity. We want you to be able to find a main champ that you're excited to play with. And so for those first 10, we want them to be very different, and we still want to keep providing new experiences with future champs.
We don't want to bring someone in that's very, very similar to one that already exists, right? We want to have more and more new experiences for people. That's what really drives it. We want some diversity. We want some really cool new mechanical things you could try.
GosuGamers: How does the team plan to handle post-launch support and balancing updates?
Rivera: Each of our first five seasons comes with a new champ, and with that, we're obviously keeping an eye on balance, right? Balance is really important in the feel of the game, and also just making sure it's bug-free and stable. That's all very challenging and important.
We don't know what a good balance cadence is, right? We know that a year is probably too long and doing it as often as League of Legends is probably way too fast for a fighting game, you know? So what we want to do is, we want to listen to the players. I think, early on, you're going to see more balance changes because we're getting a lot of data and, you know, people are pushing really hard on the game and finding really cool new creative stuff, and also some stuff that we want to fix that maybe we didn't intend.
So early on, I would expect a decent amount of balance changes, but I would expect that to start to stabilise, as we get further and further out. And that's going to be dependent on everybody's opinions.
GosuGamers: Lastly, any hints on upcoming champions in the playable roster?
Rivera: You'll have to stay tuned! You're not getting any hints out of me today. You're trying to get me in trouble out here. No, I would love to give hints. I would say beyond those future five champs, I would like to say: look forward to our early access champ. I think you're going to have a great time.
Well, we now know who that champ is. Following our interview with Rivera, Riot revealed that 2XKO’s early access champ is none other than Teemo!
2XKO launches in early access on 7 October, 2025.
