League of Legends fans are looking forward to Riot Games’ upcoming 2XKO, a fighting game with tag team mechanics similar to Marvel vs Capcom. However, Riot also had plans to make a Smash-style platform fighter with their League characters, but that was abandoned recently thanks to MultiVersus.
Mikhail Klimentov of Reader Grev revealed that Riot was working on a platform fighter codenamed “Pool Party, which would have featured LoL characters. Klimentov says that there was at least 70-80 people working on this project and that it never left the prototype stage before it was cancelled.
Despite League of Legends being incredibly popular with gamers, Riot decided to scrap this game after the “weird stuff” surrounding MultiVersus in 2023. While the Warner Bros. fighter was pretty popular for a brief moment, monetization issues and its unclear status as a beta annoyed players.
It’s odd that MultiVersus scared off this potential League of Legends platform fighter, though there’s a chance that Riot had similar strategies in mind. 2XKO is going to launch as a free-to-play fighter, so there’s a possibility that “Pool Party” would have done the same, giving players microtransactions for some features. Considering how fans are already pretty annoyed with free-to-play games, two “free” platform fighters could have annoyed more of them.
At the time of writing, other platform fighters have stuck with standard retail and digital releases, though none of them have matched Super Smash Bros. for quality. For their part, Warner Bros. is still supporting MultiVersus and it could end up better once they add more cool characters, but it’s not great right now.
Riot’s upcoming 2XKO is scheduled for a 2025 release, with aims to fill that Marvel vs Capcom void in the hearts of many players. There is an upcoming Marvel vs Capcom collection that’s exciting fans, but those are old games and the League of Legends fighter could offer fans something new.