May 9th was a dark day on the official 2XKO Discord. The conversation about potential characters started out as harmless as it would have been if there had been no news to discuss for years. But this time, the debate turned to the complexities of how Fiddlesticks (a skinny, horror-inspired scarecrow) would transition. League of Legends is full of champions who are in a tricky position to derive their fighting game movesets from.
I call this the Fiddlesticks problem. How do you bring in a weirdo (someone who has no direct connection to the genre) and bring him into the genre in an interesting way? The balance between keeping the character faithful to the source material and making the character fun to play is a dangerous tightrope walk.
This is something the 2XKO team had to address with characters like Ahri, whose movement has been completely reworked between public builds. Designer Alex Jaffe talked a bit about this balance at Evo 2023, and I came back to Evo to ask similar questions.
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Much like Fiddlesticks being in the Demacian wastelands, this topic is a curse that interviewees like Sean Rivera will have to keep talking about for as long as 2XKO is supported. Every time a new character is introduced to the game, someone will ask, “How did you get[Champion]’s League kit into this fighting game?” Sean or someone else will smile, nod, and offer some insight into the design process. Their fate will forever be that way. With Ahri being reworked and Jinx’s information being put back on the drawing board, I feel less guilty combing his thoughts. How do we fix the Fiddlesticks problem?
“League champions are popular for a number of reasons,” Rivera said, sitting at a table near the 2XKO booth. “Sometimes it’s because of the mechanics of the champion, sometimes it’s because of the subject matter. For us, what makes a great fighting game character? I believe any League champion can make a great fighting game character. I have that much confidence in our team.”
“Let me ask you this. I’ll turn it around. If you look at Fiddlesticks, he’s a horror character. He’s scary, he’s creepy, he’s intimidating. He also has great skins. We can definitely give a character that’s weird and has a lot of weird horror aspects! 100%! Players have told me that champions have immutable properties. Sometimes there’s a mechanic that has to be there, or it’s not the champion. Or there’s a theme. Sometimes if a fighting game had a mechanic, it wouldn’t be fun to play! So it’s a combination of both, and it’s our job to elevate the champion from there.”
A follow-up question, and one that probably hasn’t been asked a million times, is how can players show their loyalty to their characters! Earlier this year, I spoke with League of Legends Game Director Fu Liu about the future of the game, and he mentioned that it’s important for players to be able to show their love for their chosen main. 2XKO is the same IP, made by the same company. Is there a similar emphasis on player expression?
“There are a lot of things to consider when deciding what champions to put in the game. One of the most important things is, what is the marginalized segment of the player base that we can really serve? What I mean is, I want you to find a main that you can fall in love with in the game. People fall in love with themes – the way they act, the identity, the ethnicity they signal, the clothes they wear, their attitude… even the taunts! All of that, and this mechanic sounds fun! I want to put that mechanic in the game. It could be one or the other, or both. So that’s how I choose to put it in the game. And I want to increase the number of opportunities that people can go for it. This is my main! This is what I’ve been waiting for.”
“After that, we want to do a bunch of different things so that people can express their favorite characters in our games. We’ll go into a little bit more detail about that later in Alpha Lab, but we think it’s cool to have a character that you want to play as, but we also think it’s cool to show off that character.”
So there may be hope that even the most outrageous and bizarre mains can make it in. Yuumi, Taric, Corki, and Fiddlesticks may be less likely, but they still seem possible. If you’re anything like the people who’ve been hanging around the 2XKO Reddit and Discord for the past three years, even the faintest glimmer of hope can last forever. Hang in there.
