This is the exclusive reason I don't play it. Riot went all in on their trojan-horse malware because not enough people protested it in Valorant. Now all of their games require it suddenly. Games that have been operating fine for years, suddenly require a fresh new 'anti-cheat' to curb the massive threat of players having fun wrong?
No, I reckon this is what it appears to be. Mass data-harvesting and spying.
There's a market for fighting games, but it's a niche with a community that's very picky. And they're already segmented into big names like Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Guilty Gear, etc. Where each of those is nearly considered a genre unto itself, most of them with literal decades of polish.
This thing was apparently a 2v2 tag-team fighter. So the potential audience was:
League players who wanted to play something besides League.
MVC players who wanted 2 characters instead of 3?
I guess they were hoping the IP was strong enough that they could pull off what Persona 4 Arena did, but again: that would require a League player to play something other than League. They had a potential audience of dozens.
Seriously, there probably was a small audience for this. Even the most obscure fighting games have some dedicated base out there, but Riot probably pumped a shit load of money into it thinking it was going to be a big hit and that was never realistic.
One of the multitude of Riot's problems is that this game was scrapped and restarted 3 times.
First it was a 1v1 game, then it was a 1+assist vs 1+assist (think the most recent Mortal Kombat), then it became what it is now, a 2v2 tag fighter with active/handshake tag.
This game should have either stayed a 1v1 game, or if they really wanted to do multiple characters, do it KoF format where its 1v1 with alternating characters.
One of the main reasons that Marvel vs Capcom Infinite died so quickly was because it was 2v2, and playing UMVC3 on a regular basis now has made me realize that there's so much that developers of tag fighters need to do in order to match up to UMVC3 gameplay wise, that only really DBFZ has done.
Riot wanted the Arcane audience to pick up the game, like the primary reason duos exists as an options is so that casuals could play with friends, but considering the fact that they removed motion inputs and the button cluster is so crowded, it tried to appeal to everyone and appeals to no one.
MOBAs/HeroShooters generally got popular because with a team of ~5 you can always blame your loss on shitty teammates. But in a fighting game it's still inherently 1 on 1 (even tag fighters).
This is a big self-own not being able to understand the psychology of average gamers.
I'd say an additional problem with a tag fighting game is you need a big roster. 2XKO has 11 champs. It's absurd they can't knock out 20-30 champs with Riot's resources.
Technically, it wouldn't be so niche if the games weren't so niche.
Many of us have simply outgrown them because they haven't changed in three decades. The input lag has been reduced and the graphics have improved, but they're the exact same games we've played since the 1990s.
I've recently been replaying Mortal Kombat 9 and Virtua Fighter 5, and by far, Virtua Fighter 5 is the most polished-playing 3D fighter ever made, and that game came out 20 years ago!
In 20 years, there has been approximately ZERO innovations in the fighting game space. It's the exact same thing, over, and over, and over again.
I think a lot more people would be interested in fighting games maybe resembled fight scenes in movies, or properly rekindled classics like the Shaw Bros., films. Indie titles like Wu-Tang vs Shaolin 2 is a neat entry, but even it is more about the novelty of heroic martial artists doing battle than anything innovative.
Sega rolled out a pretty cool concept video for the upcoming Virtua Fighter that does kind of play into what I was talking about, making the fights look like they come out of movies, but I doubt the actual game will be anything remotely close to that.
In Riot's case, they basically took yet another tired old concept and threw League of Legends characters into the game and expected it to carry on brand name alone. At least Diesel Legacy had the gumption to try a multi-lane system and had some innovations in the story mode for different characters. From what I've seen of Riot's fighting game, it had absolutely nothing new about its design.
Well, it's obvious that Riot released 2XKO to compete with Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 in the pro gaming market. The thing is both those markets are quite small and I doubt 2XKO was going to grow it by much but I maybe Riot was hoping they would.
The roster is obviously tiny, with a lot of the cast being in Arcane and they did 0 marketing based on that. They don't even have a title that tells you its a league product. Arcane has 0 international appeal so China and Korea get nothing from that. I don't think China plays a lot of fighting games, and Japan has a very small league server so those are duds too. Visual appeal by region is very different with China loving their simple edgy ninjas and lean hot girls, where as Americans like unique monsters or monsterfied humans. There are too many ranged characters and the melee characters they chose mostly play as lumbering and slow in the main game. Blitzcrank is essentially a 1 button character in the main game. Because the roster is so small theres no natural partner for each character, and there are plenty in the lore to choose from. There are tons of league characters that can function well in a fighting game and are popular, but this roster is not them. They also should have put in a Ryu vs Ken analog to have a baseline for the games fundamentals.
The cutesy/hot girl characters that sell the most skins do not translate well to a fighting game because they are mostly low agency and ranged. From their girl band KDA they put in a ranged mage instead of a melee assassin. They didn't put in their incredibly popular blind monk character which you would expect to be an automatic entry whose skins include Muay Thai, Dragon Fist (its Bruce Lee), Knockout (Boxing), and God Fist. There is minimal sex appeal. Caitlyn and Vi are smelly lesbians who got an explicit sex scene in Arcane for some reason. Jinx is a Harley Quin copy with a black simping love interest in Ekko. Ahri is wearing shoes which is no good for fighting game coomers. Ahri is rated very highly in visual appeal for all regions and both sexes (a previous Riot dev called her female James Bond), but I don't think can work well in a fighting game. Illaoi is allegedly female.
League players are way too casual to play a fighting game and a core principal of league is blaming your teammates for everything. The 2v2 entries that I've played in Street Fighter x Tekken and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 were both poorly received so maybe 2v2 is just off-putting to consumers.
and who the fuck wants to play against teemo man
I've sadly played a lot of league, played some MVC3, Tekken Tag2, and Street Fighter 4+5. I've seen a few reviews of Arcane and a little footage of this game.
4 days later edit
a few days after this post they announced the melee assassin ninja Akali, and a another character with a gun, who is also brown, Senna
I have no idea why a sidescroller fighting game would succeed or fail. Or what Riot is doing these days. Anyone actually play League of Legends here?
The IP is one of those rare fence-sitters between woke and independent because it has US developers but Chinese (Tencent) funding. This is probably why their Netflix TV show Arcane has a bunch of lesbians and black people, but also has a waifu heavily inspired by Harley Quinn (Jynx). So I don't know if this one cleanly breaks down into "go woke go broke".
edit: let's not forget that Riot's weirdly amazingly popular foray into kpop (KDA) has four obviously sexy women. Riot is such a weird company
I think the management is actually holding a lot of the woke at bay. The protests by the devs at the riot hq were all pretty much fat blue haired whores with nose rings
I haven't played the League 'main game', which is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), in ages, but used to, but a TL;DR is that for the past few years, Tencent has been trying to make the League of Legends a multimedia franchise among the likes of Marvel, DC, etc, with a digital trading card game (which died because it was actually TOO F2P, to where the incentives of players to pay for premium currency wasn't there), and have an action RPG, multiple shows other than Arcane planned, a MMO (allegedly, I think it's dead) and had a platform fighter (think Smash) planned but scrapped it after the death of Multiversus.
Riot's so into the kpop stuff because by far the largest playerbase for the main game is South Korea, followed by China. The members of K/DA are skins of characters who have their own lore, and a large number of skins for League of Legends characters are of them in alternate universes, like there's a whole magical girl line of skins named "Star Guardian", with its own setting and everything, just as one example.
Honestly League kind of went off the rails as soon as they focused on DIEversifying the cast. There was a time when all of the characters were (more or less) White/Asian, and straight (or at least, not-sexualized).
The devs are desperate to try to turn it gayer, and management is probably just trying to get them to make sexy kpop-girl skins.
This is news to me. Like, news that this game even exists. I've literally never heard of it. Maybe that's their problem.
I'm not a complete shut in gamer or anything, but I definitely consider gaming as one of my main 3 activities/hobbies, Gaming/Gym/shooting&hunting. The fact a major game dev had a game out that never even crossed my mental is crazy.
It's actually a pretty good fighting game. They had a lot of talented fighting game people working on it for like 7 years.
I'm not going to play it though because it needs you to install their rootkit anticheat.
This is the exclusive reason I don't play it. Riot went all in on their trojan-horse malware because not enough people protested it in Valorant. Now all of their games require it suddenly. Games that have been operating fine for years, suddenly require a fresh new 'anti-cheat' to curb the massive threat of players having fun wrong?
No, I reckon this is what it appears to be. Mass data-harvesting and spying.
Interesting. I've always had 0 interest in fighting games like this and I guess that's how the market feels too.
There's a market for fighting games, but it's a niche with a community that's very picky. And they're already segmented into big names like Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Guilty Gear, etc. Where each of those is nearly considered a genre unto itself, most of them with literal decades of polish.
This thing was apparently a 2v2 tag-team fighter. So the potential audience was:
I guess they were hoping the IP was strong enough that they could pull off what Persona 4 Arena did, but again: that would require a League player to play something other than League. They had a potential audience of dozens.
Seriously, there probably was a small audience for this. Even the most obscure fighting games have some dedicated base out there, but Riot probably pumped a shit load of money into it thinking it was going to be a big hit and that was never realistic.
One of the multitude of Riot's problems is that this game was scrapped and restarted 3 times.
First it was a 1v1 game, then it was a 1+assist vs 1+assist (think the most recent Mortal Kombat), then it became what it is now, a 2v2 tag fighter with active/handshake tag.
This game should have either stayed a 1v1 game, or if they really wanted to do multiple characters, do it KoF format where its 1v1 with alternating characters.
One of the main reasons that Marvel vs Capcom Infinite died so quickly was because it was 2v2, and playing UMVC3 on a regular basis now has made me realize that there's so much that developers of tag fighters need to do in order to match up to UMVC3 gameplay wise, that only really DBFZ has done.
Riot wanted the Arcane audience to pick up the game, like the primary reason duos exists as an options is so that casuals could play with friends, but considering the fact that they removed motion inputs and the button cluster is so crowded, it tried to appeal to everyone and appeals to no one.
MOBAs/HeroShooters generally got popular because with a team of ~5 you can always blame your loss on shitty teammates. But in a fighting game it's still inherently 1 on 1 (even tag fighters).
This is a big self-own not being able to understand the psychology of average gamers.
I'd say an additional problem with a tag fighting game is you need a big roster. 2XKO has 11 champs. It's absurd they can't knock out 20-30 champs with Riot's resources.
I wish we had more Power Stone fans...
Yeah, that's my conclusion too.
That's just the average AAA game as of recent.
Technically, it wouldn't be so niche if the games weren't so niche.
Many of us have simply outgrown them because they haven't changed in three decades. The input lag has been reduced and the graphics have improved, but they're the exact same games we've played since the 1990s.
I've recently been replaying Mortal Kombat 9 and Virtua Fighter 5, and by far, Virtua Fighter 5 is the most polished-playing 3D fighter ever made, and that game came out 20 years ago!
In 20 years, there has been approximately ZERO innovations in the fighting game space. It's the exact same thing, over, and over, and over again.
I think a lot more people would be interested in fighting games maybe resembled fight scenes in movies, or properly rekindled classics like the Shaw Bros., films. Indie titles like Wu-Tang vs Shaolin 2 is a neat entry, but even it is more about the novelty of heroic martial artists doing battle than anything innovative.
Sega rolled out a pretty cool concept video for the upcoming Virtua Fighter that does kind of play into what I was talking about, making the fights look like they come out of movies, but I doubt the actual game will be anything remotely close to that.
In Riot's case, they basically took yet another tired old concept and threw League of Legends characters into the game and expected it to carry on brand name alone. At least Diesel Legacy had the gumption to try a multi-lane system and had some innovations in the story mode for different characters. From what I've seen of Riot's fighting game, it had absolutely nothing new about its design.
they were always meant to be arcade games, picked up on a whim during a day of fun and challenging random strangers standing at the same machine.
they were never supposed to be home entertainment.
Well, it's obvious that Riot released 2XKO to compete with Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6 in the pro gaming market. The thing is both those markets are quite small and I doubt 2XKO was going to grow it by much but I maybe Riot was hoping they would.
The roster is obviously tiny, with a lot of the cast being in Arcane and they did 0 marketing based on that. They don't even have a title that tells you its a league product. Arcane has 0 international appeal so China and Korea get nothing from that. I don't think China plays a lot of fighting games, and Japan has a very small league server so those are duds too. Visual appeal by region is very different with China loving their simple edgy ninjas and lean hot girls, where as Americans like unique monsters or monsterfied humans. There are too many ranged characters and the melee characters they chose mostly play as lumbering and slow in the main game. Blitzcrank is essentially a 1 button character in the main game. Because the roster is so small theres no natural partner for each character, and there are plenty in the lore to choose from. There are tons of league characters that can function well in a fighting game and are popular, but this roster is not them. They also should have put in a Ryu vs Ken analog to have a baseline for the games fundamentals.
The cutesy/hot girl characters that sell the most skins do not translate well to a fighting game because they are mostly low agency and ranged. From their girl band KDA they put in a ranged mage instead of a melee assassin. They didn't put in their incredibly popular blind monk character which you would expect to be an automatic entry whose skins include Muay Thai, Dragon Fist (its Bruce Lee), Knockout (Boxing), and God Fist. There is minimal sex appeal. Caitlyn and Vi are smelly lesbians who got an explicit sex scene in Arcane for some reason. Jinx is a Harley Quin copy with a black simping love interest in Ekko. Ahri is wearing shoes which is no good for fighting game coomers. Ahri is rated very highly in visual appeal for all regions and both sexes (a previous Riot dev called her female James Bond), but I don't think can work well in a fighting game. Illaoi is allegedly female.
League players are way too casual to play a fighting game and a core principal of league is blaming your teammates for everything. The 2v2 entries that I've played in Street Fighter x Tekken and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 were both poorly received so maybe 2v2 is just off-putting to consumers.
and who the fuck wants to play against teemo man
I've sadly played a lot of league, played some MVC3, Tekken Tag2, and Street Fighter 4+5. I've seen a few reviews of Arcane and a little footage of this game.
4 days later edit a few days after this post they announced the melee assassin ninja Akali, and a another character with a gun, who is also brown, Senna
I have no idea why a sidescroller fighting game would succeed or fail. Or what Riot is doing these days. Anyone actually play League of Legends here?
The IP is one of those rare fence-sitters between woke and independent because it has US developers but Chinese (Tencent) funding. This is probably why their Netflix TV show Arcane has a bunch of lesbians and black people, but also has a waifu heavily inspired by Harley Quinn (Jynx). So I don't know if this one cleanly breaks down into "go woke go broke".
edit: let's not forget that Riot's weirdly amazingly popular foray into kpop (KDA) has four obviously sexy women. Riot is such a weird company
I think the management is actually holding a lot of the woke at bay. The protests by the devs at the riot hq were all pretty much fat blue haired whores with nose rings
I haven't played the League 'main game', which is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), in ages, but used to, but a TL;DR is that for the past few years, Tencent has been trying to make the League of Legends a multimedia franchise among the likes of Marvel, DC, etc, with a digital trading card game (which died because it was actually TOO F2P, to where the incentives of players to pay for premium currency wasn't there), and have an action RPG, multiple shows other than Arcane planned, a MMO (allegedly, I think it's dead) and had a platform fighter (think Smash) planned but scrapped it after the death of Multiversus.
Riot's so into the kpop stuff because by far the largest playerbase for the main game is South Korea, followed by China. The members of K/DA are skins of characters who have their own lore, and a large number of skins for League of Legends characters are of them in alternate universes, like there's a whole magical girl line of skins named "Star Guardian", with its own setting and everything, just as one example.
Honestly League kind of went off the rails as soon as they focused on DIEversifying the cast. There was a time when all of the characters were (more or less) White/Asian, and straight (or at least, not-sexualized).
The devs are desperate to try to turn it gayer, and management is probably just trying to get them to make sexy kpop-girl skins.
This is news to me. Like, news that this game even exists. I've literally never heard of it. Maybe that's their problem.
I'm not a complete shut in gamer or anything, but I definitely consider gaming as one of my main 3 activities/hobbies, Gaming/Gym/shooting&hunting. The fact a major game dev had a game out that never even crossed my mental is crazy.