May 9th was a dark day on the 2XKO Discord. The conversation about possible characters started out innocuously, as it had in years when there was no news to discuss. But this time, the debate turned into an argument over the complexity of how Fiddlesticks, a gangly scarecrow of terror, would transform. League of Legends is chock-full of champions who find themselves in a tricky situation to derive a set of fighting game moves from.
I call this the Fiddlesticks problem. How do you bring an oddball (someone with no direct connection to the genre) into the genre in an exciting way. Striking the balance between keeping the character faithful to the source material and keeping the character interesting is a dangerous tightrope.
The 2XKO team will definitely have to address issues with characters like Ahri, whose moveset was completely overhauled between public versions. Designer Alex Jaffe talked to me about this balance at Evo 2023, and I’m back at Evo to ask similar questions.
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Because like Fiddlesticks’s existence in the Demacia wilderness, this topic is a curse that people like my interviewee Shaun Rivera are destined to talk about as long as they support 2XKO. Every time a new character is added to the game, someone will ask “How did you get your League of Legends gear?” [champ] And bring it into this fighting game”. Then, Sean or someone else would smile and nod and offer insights into the design process, and their fate would be forever. With Ahri’s rework and information about Jinx being taken back to the drawing board being discussed publicly, I felt less guilty about combing through his ideas. How to solve the Fiddlesticks problem?
“League of Legends champions are popular for a lot of reasons,” Rivera said, sitting at a table near the 2XKO booth. “Sometimes it’s the mechanics of the champion, sometimes it’s the theme. For us, the question is, what makes a cool fighting game character? I really believe we can create a cool fighting game character for any League of Legends champion—that’s how much faith I have in our team.”
“Let me ask you this. Let me ask you the opposite. When you look at Fiddlesticks, you see that the character is a horror character. Scary, creepy, and intimidating. And the skin is also delightful. We can definitely create a weird character with a lot of weird horror elements! 100%! Players tell us that heroes have unchangeable properties. Sometimes it’s a mechanic they have to have, otherwise it’s not that hero. Or, it’s the theme. Sometimes if a mechanic is in a fighting game, it’s not as fun to play! So it’s a combination of both, and our job is to elevate the hero from there.”
The next question is how players can show their character loyalty, a question that has probably been asked countless times! Earlier this year, we spoke with League of Legends game director Liu Pu about the future of the game, and he pointed out that it was important for players to express their love for their chosen protagonist. 2XKO belongs to the same IP and was created by the same company. Does it have the same emphasis on player expression?
“Whenever we decide which hero to put in the game, we think about a lot of things. One of the big things is what part of our player base is an underserved audience that we can really do a good job of serving. What I mean by that is, we want you to find a protagonist in our game that you can fall in love with. People fall in love with them through their themes – meaning the way they act, who they are, the race they indicate, the clothes they wear, their attitude… even their taunts! All of that, and, hey, this mechanic looks fun! I want to use this mechanic in this game. It can be one, it can be the other, or it can be both. That’s how we choose what to put in the game – hopefully we can increase the chances that people will go, ‘This is my protagonist! This is what I’ve been waiting for.'”
“After that, we want to do a lot of different things to allow people to play as their favorite characters in our games. You’ll see more about that in the future, maybe in Alpha Lab, but we definitely think it’s cool to have a character that you’d love to play as, but to showcase that character.”
So maybe there’s hope, even your most ridiculous, weird main can make it. The odds against Yuumi, Taric, Corki, and Fiddlesticks might be low, but it still seems like a chance. If you’re anything like the people who’ve been hanging out on the 2XKO Reddit or Discord for the past three years, even the faintest hope is enough to keep you going forever. Hang in there.
