If you’ve paid any amount of attention to fighting game fans, influencers, or players over the past year, you’ll know Project L is the looming presence thundering towards us from the murky future. It’s the elephant in the room in the purest sense, a presence that every new release, every new announcement, and every new development in the genre is measured around.
The folks at Riot Games appear to understand the environment they’re walking into; R&D Projects that end up greenlit and pushed into the forefront. The first ever bit of news we ever saw with Project L revolved around the esteemed and experienced staff that were leading development, a strategy Riot had previously used before with Legends of Runeterra and Valorant, which championed big names in their respective genres. This, as it was obviously intended to do, made every 30+ year old buster with an arcade stick a little hot around the collar. Follow that up with announcements of free-to-play, great netcode, and a 2v2 format, and the pants came off.
But, while Riot may have the crowd with boxed copies of Street Fighter 4 hyped, it is arguably far more important for the long term success of Project L that it wins over the non-fighting game crowd. The League, Valorant, Runeterra and Wild Rift communities not only dwarf the FGC, but are most likely the first group of truly fresh players who’ll pick Riot’s foray into fighting games up first, too. The big question on my mind regarding Project L right now is simply, ‘do League of Legends players actually give a shit?’