If you can believe in it, 2XKO is almost out. With the closed beta coming to PC this September, Riot Games’ fighting game will soon be in the hands of the public, as will the initial roster of (at least) eight characters plucked from the world of League of Legends.
The initial eight are faithful, gratifying, and profound in their mechanical complexity. A portion of the fighting game community has attached another word to the roster, though: boring. Or at least, unsurprising. As time has moved on, more and more ‘poster children’ for League of Legends have made their way to the roster, leaving those with a hunger for freaky picks at the farther edges of the IP a tad concerned.
So, to find out why the 2XKO developer has chosen to play it safe, or whether it believes it’s even played it safe to begin with, Eurogamer sat down with both executive producer Tom Cannon and game director Shaun Rivera at Evo 2025. It was at this event that 2XKO would host its final public event demo before the game would have a permanent presence on players’ computers at homes.
The following interview was with both Tom Cannon and Shaun Rivera separately, though their answers have been combined under shared questions for clarity. Speaking to Eurogamer, both Cannon and Riviera dig into why the team picked the champs in the current roster, why the focus on ‘poster child’ champs over some beloved deep cuts, how big a part popularity of a champion played in their inclusion, and when players can expect some of the weirder picks form the LoL universe to make an appearance.
Eurogamer: Why did the team pick these eight characters for the initial roster?
Tom Cannon: So we started from scratch on this right? We went from building the team from scratch, then all the technology from scratch, then figuring out what the game was. We started out with characters that are broad enough to have a healthy meta – in terms of gameplay. So we have our zoner, we have our striker. But, from a development perspective, there’s a lot to do to build a lot of those wacky characters that people want like monsters and things like that. Just from a tech, art, and rigging / animation perspective. If we tried to do all of it at once, it would be very difficult.