There’s 170 champions in League of Legends, so there should be no shortage to choose from for the 2XKO fighting game spinoff, however, it sounds like it’ll take quite a bit of time to see even a solid chunk of them.
According to the developers, 2XKO will be launching with a much smaller roster count of characters than many probably predicted.
Following the big developer update for the League fighter yesterday, Riot Games opened up an “ask me anything” session on the official 2XKO Discord server.
There one fan asked how many champions are planned for the launch of the game to which Director Shaun Rivera responded with a pretty open reply.
“We will have 10 playable champions at launch,” wrote Rivera on the Discord AMA. “We know it’s a smaller number than you would expect, but when faced with a trade-off of including even more champions resulting in delaying the release date vs. getting it into your hands sooner, we are excited about the latter.
“We also believe that experiencing these champions through solo/duo play via a number of different fuses provide a lot for folks to dig into early on. The fact that we are a live service game means that it will only get better from there via new champion releases and gameplay updates.”
So there you have it. 2XKO will launch with only 10 playable characters, and we already know most of them.
2XKO will be launching with 10 champions!
(via 2XKO Discord) pic.twitter.com/iBwE1Vz1hs
— 2XKO INTEL (@2XKOintel) March 28, 2025
Through the Alpha Lab 2 test, Ahri, Braum, Darius, Ekko, Illaoi, Jinx and Yasuo are all selectable, so that’s seven right there.
And in the first footage of the game as Project L, Katarina was included too, however, it’s unknown if she’s still planned to be in the game at launch.
This is a surprisingly low number of characters considering just how long 2XKO has been worked on over at Riot Games.
The Cannon brothers first teased the existence of Project L all the way back at Evo 2019.
From there, Project L was shown off in its early concept phase in October 2019 as a seemingly 1v1 fighting game.
It’s currently unknown how long exactly 2XKO has been worked on in its current 2v2 state in full production, but it’s certainly been multiple years.
Launching with just 10 characters is already a small number, but that becomes even more important with the game positioned as a team fighter.
Similar tag-based games like Dragon Ball FighterZ faced criticism for roster sizes, and that game released with 24 characters.
We also have to see how Riot chooses to handle post-release characters in terms of pricing and things like free champion rotations.
Ultimately, this is the reality faced by the developers given their release window, so it remains to be seen how that’ll go over with fighting game players and League of Legends fans.
2XKO is slated to release in late 2025 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
A second 2XKO Alpha Lab test is scheduled to take place in April.
Source: Event Hubs
