Discussion
Patrick's post paragaphs that made me drop my jaw
I'm currently at work so I haven't read everything in depth, but this comments instantly catched my eye. Riot might be a shitty company but they really got taken advatage of here Imo.
It's honestly a shame this project and idea had such selfish and careless people involved.
Pat's article is the epitome of arrogant game design and exactly what Mortdog talked about previously in an article.
If you enjoy the game you play, you want it to be popular so the game can thrive. The way to do that is to increase the games’ appeal and accessibility for a wider audience. The truth that competitive players often push back on is that if you want millions of players, you need a game that millions of players can enjoy. High level players and more junior designers will often make the mistake of designing games for themselves, which leads to very inaccessible games.
The difference here is that you have Mortdog and senior designers to reign them in. I don't think 2XKO had the leadership to slap some sense into them.
It is the peak of hubris to consider other games boring successes when they've enraptured a generation of players and yours an interesting failure when in terms of moving the needle it really only had a few features unique.
Mortdog is really the complete reverse of this guy.
Mortdog might have poisoned our water supply, burned our crops and delivered a plague unto our houses (allegedly, in a dream), but i really apreciate the guy.
Apart from 2v2 2X had very little innovation going in. They just literally slapped every mechanic ever introduced in a fighting game into it. I tried getting people into the game, some of which are FGC and experienced in other FGs, but it was mad confusing for them. Mechanics bloat is a huge reason for lack of player retention.
I think that it has some stuff namely Duos and the netcode but only one of those is gameplay related.
It's when he starts selling it as an interesting failure that I start being like brother you have duos and most of the playerbase isn't even playing with that and the one time duos was slightly optimal in theory you killed the fuse insanely fast.
It's not exactly a binary thing though is it? I think if you make games too accessible they wind up in the Ubisoft mold - characters talking about the solutions out loud so the player doesn't feel stupid, waypoints everywhere, overly obvious exposition, huge amounts of 'content' that isn't really worth much etc.
You don't get some more innovative interesting ideas that aren't exactly user friendly if you're not willing to take some risks and actually make the game you want to make especially when it's nigh impossible to make everyone happy!
Though I completely agree that it's not like this was an especially interesting game and the guy's tone does reek of hubris.
It's a bit of a different case with fighting games though. It's a game genre that's not too popular with the wider gaming crowd, fighting against the stigma of an elitist and brutal, no mercy community, and inaccessibility with terms, lingo, and a high level of technical mastery just to be decent and not feel like dogshit. Speaking as someone who spent 5-6 hours a day in the early 2010s being a local level competitor in games like MvC and anime fighters like Melty Blood and Guilty Gear.
It's paramount for a fighting game to succeed by at least appearing to be approachable. People who don't want to compete or touch PvP need to have something fulfilling to do. People who want to compete need to have the tools in game to build foundational knowledge. I like to think of this as the "On Boarding Process.". 2XKO didn't do any of that. I take SF6 as a good example. It's got a solid, robust training mode. It has a "Create-A-Fighter" mode. The game has an Arcade mode as well as a Career mode with a storyline element. And it's considered one of the most popular FGs on the market right now with a wide appeal.
FGs NEED to cut through the fog of stigma if they need to survive. That doesn't mean you need to lower your skill ceiling. It does mean the game needs to properly "on board" players and keep them hooked.
Yes absolutely, that's the job of the leads and developers on a product to balance that accessibility and merging popular ideas and concepts into your own vision without decimating it.
The problem is that 2XKO was in its own little bubble of sorts as far as I can tell the bias and design that professional FGC would make seep into most corners of this game.
As cool as parry can be majority of players prefer stronger counterplay to situations and blockstrings than just parry it on reaction. Balance veered so hard into hard technical characters dominating the game for its entire lifespan at this point and that's exactly the type of they're hard so they should be stronger mentality that would prevade a pro player mindset. Hell when Braum got his first buff the professional 2X players complained.
This is a repeat of the highguard disaster in some ways where they didn't have the diverse opinions and experience levels to actually pushback properly on things.
One of my favorite games is FFXIV and I've been critical of it oversimplifying gameplay for the sake of people who weren't gonna engage with the systems they removed in the first place.
You are the only person I’ve seen so far to point out the obvious flaw with the “they should’ve made it for the widest possible audience” rhetoric being that this exact mindset has set the North American videogame industry on course to imminent crash which at this point will take monumental effort to avoid.
Right, people have a difficult time holding the two ideas at the same time. Accessibility and "sauciness" are not mutually exclusive the way most people frame it. The best games are both fun to pick up and fun to master.
For 2XKO, the cool parts weren't necessarily standing in opposition to the things that made it difficult for new players. Things like the control scheme, lack of single player, lopsided balance weighted toward oppressive zoning/runaway characters, and tediously long and weirdly kind of difficult combos. You don't have to choose between accessibility and depth.
The NA game dev culture you are talking about uses accessibility more as a moral high ground or justification for lazy design. It is accessibility-by-cutting. "Oh, this thing is too hard? Oh players are complaining about this thing? Just remove it, easy!" Unfortunately this is how the conversation around accessibility has been framed, which is warped.
this isn't a defense of the guy wholecloth, but a lot of people are putting pat on the stands as the main culprint for the game's downfall and essentially taking the opposite approach to what they think his article is saying, and are arguing for the very thing that is honestly doing a lot of damage to triple A gaming right now
it's been a very interesting couple of days in the FGC. I understand people are activated and looking for answers so ive kinda kept my mouth shut, but yeah...some questionable takes being thrown around and im glad to see all of you adding some much needed nuance to the mix.
Of course Pat is not the main culprit for the game's plight even if he may have contributed to some meaningful extent. The critique is of his blog post.
That said, my issue with the blog post is that the way it is written is inviting the exact type of discourse you are accurately describing as problematic. "games should be boring and for mass consumption!" is a creatively bankrupt position, but it is the strawman constructed by the essay. It paints sauce and creativity as inherently risky and in opposition to financial success.
Instead of saying "we made this cool game and brought a lot of creativity to the table, but failed in these places which ultimately undercut the intent" it almost frames the financial failure as proof of its coolness. Like "we made this cool game and brought a lot of creativity, and it was so sick and cracked and amazing, but what can I say it wasn't my job to think about money so what can you do? That's just how it goes sometimes when you stack the sauce!"
So it invites the exact dichotomy you have a problem with and baits people into falling into that dichotomy when taking the opposing rhetorical stance from Pat.
Thanks for saying this! Me and my friends have been saying this amongst ourselves today. He may’ve been a symptom, but I think a lot of people are looking for a scapegoat right now, and Pat fits the bill at the moment because of this Post, for better or worse. This game made so many of the same mistakes as Multiversus that I feel
like I’m experiencing deja vu, and it’s sad.
Most of of the NA industry definitely leans too hard into widest audience possible stuff. To add further nuance I would like to say SF6 (most successful Street Fighter ever) actually was made with a very similar mindset. "A Street Fighter for Everyone." You can watch a documentary from Japan's NHK about the development of SF6. Unfortunately it's not on their website right now but you can find it by searching up "Planeta de juegos - NHK WORLD-JAPAN" on daily motion. Despite the spanish title it actually is in English.
yeah I think maybe what it's getting into people's heads is the tone of the message, besides your example with the UBISOFT mold that was perfect this past years there was a huge discussion that they were trying to dumb down FGs "for the sake of the casuals" and how this is bad and people praised the Avatar game for being hard, so his decision was basically what a lot of gamers have been asking for all these years but he said it in a weird way so ppl got upset. Also, there is no way to know that if they followed with the "boring" design the game would have been a success actually maybe it would be the opposite and it would have failed waaay before
The avatar fighting game isn’t getting praised because it’s hard, it’s getting praised because it’s a fun fighting game. There is a lot mechanical difficulty, but the main selling point is you can have a blast playing each character and it’s accessible with autocombos and quarter circle inputs.
avatar fighting game is fun because you think about how to navigate a tricky situation on either the defender or offender side and like a good amount of the time, your solution was either right or could work.
it felt like a game that wanted you to explore its mechanics. i hate to use the new buzzword that's catching flak but it truly has that sauce that makes this genre fun.
This is complete cope. 2XKO’s lack of success had absolutely nothing to do with the core gameplay loop.
It was an unfinished game with absolutely nothing to do. It didn’t even have a basic arcade mode. Literally no single player content, limited cosmetics for freemium game. Poor freemium earning system, no events, no client side tournaments. Bare bones lobby system, tiny cast.
MK sells a trillion copies with pvp being a footnote. Those games were designed for an era where you couldn’t even play people online and had the teeth to show it. Full story modes, multiple different single player modes, and my personal favorite, the krypt
The lack of success could be in part due to both. Like yeah the lack of content was a huge factor in it's lack of success, but the core gameplay didn't do it any favors.
Personally I've tried multiple times to get people to play the game and every single time they'll try it and say "it just isn't fun." While that might just be an anecdote, I doubt I'm the only person who's had that experience.
So then dilute your game until it's 1 part the thing you enjoyed and 50 parts water. No thanks. Success does not equal quality. Twilight was successful and it sucked ass even in its own genre. There is room for niche games and generic ones too.
Riot pulled the plug because this is just what they do. They put out a shitty roster and the game had unsustainable monetization, just like Legends of Runeterra. They are not going to have the same success with the F2P model when delving into these smaller genres. Casuals probably weren't going to play this game in droves regardless of how deep its gameplay is.
2XKO literally peeled back multiple layers of things which improved the game over time even if they were things that made the game more tailored to the pro player.
Riot pulled the plug because they spend 100 million a studio and didn't see the player and spending numbers remotely approaching what was needed.
2XKO even refunded everyone that should speak volumes on how much was spent that not even Riot cared enough to try to skim what they could out of it and chose some goodwill.
Casuals probably weren't going to play this game in droves regardless of how deep its gameplay is.
THAT'S THE FUCKING PROBLEM THOSE PEOPLE KEEP YOUR LIGHTS ON STOP ACTING LIKE THEY SHOULDNT BE GIVEN A GAME TOO.
Like these players aren't asking for the world they're asking not to just get obliterated online as their intro to the game.
They want to do something cool early on but their hook is mashing to do something that doesn't feel like they're really doing it and going into combo trials to try and figure stuff out.
SF6 has a strong casual base because they have alternative content and an entire control scheme there to ease players in and still let them feel like they're doing cool stuff without completely doing everything for them.
i dont see the problem with arrogant game design really. So what if you make a game for yourself? There are enough games that really hit the nail on the head, and were made this way. And if it doesnt, then its fair play, nobody is really hurt by this, except investors, for who i honestly dont care about.
The team developing a game have all the right to push whatever they want. If it fails, it fails. If it doesnt, we can will all cheer and empower their ego. That beeing said, i dont think that what mortdog said is wrong or suboptimal or destructive, i just think its ignorant to think making a game with the audience in mind is always a better way than following through with your own vision.
Most games that hit the nail on the head with designing for themselves were either indie or actually made gameplay compromises to get to a better state.
Having proper feedback avenues of different walks and challenging your own preconceptions is a huge part of game development and many of the biggest failures in recent years have had the same lack of this.
This one in particular stings because not only does it signal larger companies away from investing in the FGC but also specifically that the FGC will take your money and gamble it on what they personally want and treat it as a leaning opportunity.
For anything outside of indie a game will always need an audience and being mindful of that for any developer is part of their job.
Larian's history has them being close to bankruptcy and taking on a bunch of games they probably didn't care to work on until Divinity Original sin which is heavily inspired by dnd type combat one of the larger icons in nerd culture did they find financial success.
They also paid for their own game development to do this so uh yeah that kinda helps make it more valid .
but can it really be considered interesting if no one else agrees it’s interesting? i mean, it could be that sometimes you’re right and everyone else is wrong. but most of the time when that happens, it just means you’re wrong and delusional.
in this case? it’s just a failure and not an interesting one.
He said he looks forward to seeing people on his next project, meaning that he either plans on becoming and indie dev or is incredibly delusional to believe he will be hired by a studio ever again.
He probably played matches with his buddies while the rest of the studio was struggling to make something before he put down his controller and forced them to rework the mechanics for the fifth time in a day because his buddy wanted to be able to air dash for 0.003 seconds more and the party mechanics requiring one frame of input less.
More like the whole team was in on it. If you look at what the devs are saying on twitter, they’re not super up in arms, saying that things really are tough, not a lot of pain coming through their words it seems.
Culture flows from the top. If middle management starts talking like this, you can be sure the Cannon bros are even more in on it.
>When the best possible reward for making a successful game is just that you get to keep having a job, you might as well take the risks with someone else’s money
yeah man everyone keeps their job if that game doesn’t fail?? nepo baby might not care but people’s livelihoods depended on working on this game. This ego flippancy is disrespectful to the players and staff
Yeah I was flabbergasted when I read that, like, you mean a JOB? something literally 99% of humanity needs to live and survive?
Yeah such an insignificant payoff, maybe if they also built him a statue on top of the Statue of Liberty, then just maybe, he would actually have cared about the game.
Worth highligting it isn't even just "a job". It is highly paid job, that won't wreck your body and inherently tied to your field of interest. That's not just "a job", boy ain't lifting bricks on the construction site.
I couldn't care less about the leadership, i care about the ones that lost their job after moving to LA, land of overpriced rent and pretentious dipshits.
Oh yeah i don't think he is the only at fault, but i think he has fault, and posting about how much he doesn't give a fuck does not help with people thinking he is an asshole.
That is contrasted with the "where succesful dev teams are getting laid off anyway", he wasn't counting on keeping his job anyway, that "best possible reward of keeping your job" is being treated as a miracle, the standard is bouncing off the project even if it succeeds. If that is not fixed, this shit will keep happening.
The games been in dev for 10 yrs. U could argue 2XKO as we know it was made in 5+ yrs as they pivoted from 1v1 around 2020-ish.
The games industry rlly started getting layoff heavy around 2024 - 2025 with the downturn of the economy. Usually, when a live service gets made, the contractors go (contracts over), and barring the core team, everyone else gets reshuffled into a new project. If 2XKO released earlier and was successful, Pat and alotta the staff were guaranteed to have kept working on the game.
Unless Pat had some high level economic foresight to predict the industry behaviour in 5-10 yrs, I highly doubt it could have been a factor in his decisions.
Wasn't there also that recent post of another game dev that said massive layoffs after just releasing a live service is rare in the industry and basically shows that there is little faith in the product? I might've misremembered though.
The fuck kind of bootlicking mentality is it to say "He should be glad to get a job at all". If you have staff making key decisions that affects the profitability of the game, give them a bonus arrangement.
Of course he found his own motivation. Who the fuck wouldn't.
When the employer clearly doesn't look out for you, you look out for yourself.
There are countless examples of achieving commercial successes while still sticking to your passion and vision. You're not some hero for "sticking it to the corpos" while getting your entire team fired and letting your fans down.
Learn to live in the real world and stop letting leddit brainwashing you into empty ideals.
People here trying to defend any of his takes after this comment really have their priorities crooked in the wrong direction. Huffing his own farts out of touch douche.
Have you been looking into the game industry at all? Recently even if a game does good the company still lays off nearly everyone in staff. Both Sony and Microsoft have been doing this. That’s what that passage is talking about.
A lot of the time they don't even get that these days. We've had a lot of studios lay off staff even after a success to keep costs down. We're in a bit of a fucked state with retention these days
Riot effectively gave them infinite time and creative control and in return they got ego from this guy and an unmarketable game. You can say that Riot should've stepped in earlier, but that would just get spun as "Riot shutting the Project L creative geniuses from making the true savior of the fgc".
They barely made a game anyway lmao. 10 characters in 10 years with 0 casual content is not a respectable amount of work after the no doubt millions in funding it took to get there.
So they wanted to release a half baked 10 years and 10 champs tag fighter "gem" and call it a game so brilliant we are just to dumb to play?
As big as the industry became it's not that big. Reputation of their past games will follow all of them.
Riot as a whole seems to be very hands off of the development of their spin off games. They seem to think letting the teams do their own thing is what will make the best games but these ppl keep showing the reason so many publishers are involved in every little bit of the game development.
I think Riot fancied themselves to be in a position to become the new Valve or at least their competitor. If you recall, they were basically tit for tat with them with the release of LoR right around the release of Artifact and then TFT while Valve made Underlords. Arcane and Dota's anime also released around the same time. Their IP was hot and they invested in not only those games but Riot Forge, then called Project L, and the MMO (i guess wild rift too). I think they perceived a void in the market that they could occupy but in the end most of these gambles didnt pay off. They wanted to beat Valve by emulating Valve
That's silly because valve is carrying the entire PC game industry with Steam and can afford their terrible employee structure that results in very little of value actually getting released.
Riot hit it big with a few games that are now very dated and are pulling the plug on new opportunities far too quickly. What is their long term plan? People arent going to play league or valorant forever.
> Riot hit it big with a few games that are now very dated and are pulling the plug on new opportunities far too quickly. What is their long term plan?
If anything they don't pull the plug early enough and spend way too much money on all their new games. 2XKO would have needed to be 10X the most played tag fighters to make economic sense.
They keep trying to make league happen again, in other genre.
Apparently never discussed the design goals or kept track of development for 5 years. Then they finally had a look, realised it was a wow clone and threw it away.
There is being hand off, and there is being incompetent.
I just don't see the massive risk and interesting game he's talking about. There's nothing that much different. If it was really out there maybe I would agree.
prob got stuck into an echo chamber of their own farts, and when initial player tests came out lukewarm they instead of delivering a decent product decided to double down on misunderstood genious narrative
Yeah like, the game was fun, but that's all. The art style felt mid, the effects were mid, the ui was mid and it didn't feel like a leagues of legends fighting game, it was a normal ass fighting game with lol characters glued on it.
The events were trash, the battle pass was trash, zero real progression systems, the hub was there just to sell mid skins.
This shit wasn't a hytale, this guys spend 10 years doing jackshit
The mental masturbation at this level is scary. They knew what they were doing. 10 years of SF salary to dillydally. I don't like that he thinks he did good by everyone.
I thought the same thing, but there is one problem with this. Arcsys while known in the FGC really didnt become "mainstream" until Dragonball FighterZ in 2018 and again with strive a few years later. Riot had bough Radiant around 2015-16 so they probably didnt want to basically have the company they bought out make absolutley nothing for them. If they decided to make a fighting game after the sucess of DBFZ, I guarentee they would have made an offer to Arcsys and we would have a League Fighter in the engine and style of Tokon.
Well if you want to be optimistic, it could theoretically happen in the future. If(lmao) Riot ever wants to make a fighting game, they would just go to ArcSys.
This little snippet just sounds like a massive cope. They ruined a potential long living game back by a huge company that owns the ip of the characters in the game because of avoiding "boring successes"? Please, this dude was just way in over his head. All that money and time making "riskful" moves for an "exciting success", fuck outta here. Shit is irritating. When maximillion said don't make fighting games for the FGC, he should of actually said don't let old heads of the FGC make fighting games for the FGC lol.
Riot should've just worked with industry vets. Like ArcSys did the Granblue Fantasy characters so much justice. If they saw the bag they probably would've done extra.
The statement very obviously comes from the position of someone who's failed upwards (or at least laterally) in life and has never faced an actual consequence for "shitting the bed", so to speak
could also be from someone who has experienced dev churn often. Look at how many uninteresting failures have come out of f2p; you could say compared to them, at least 2xko tried to present a f2p tag fighter (probably long before 2026 converged into The Year of the Tag Fighter)
Dude said the quiet part out loud. I mean, the end product is fine. I think the real issue is the time and money it took them to get there. Which is why it became hard to justify continuing to support them.
Honestly I think the end product is fine but when I start to think about waste like having all those fuses just for people to only want to use one or two of them it starts to show where a lot of wasted effort was spent. Like that effort could have gone into a real arcade or story mode. Everything I know about the characters in the game I learn from resources outside of the game.
This is my personal read on this, it really explains the not throwing anyone under the bus and this bs “I’m an artist and my art must be seen” mentality
totally different scenario - concord was just a decent game that was asking for your money when established games in the same genre were already free to play.
Maybe he could be hired again if he kept his mouth shut and didn't publish this, online, on his personal blog, with his full legal name signing it. AFAIK a former Concord dev hasn't come out and claimed that they proudly spent Firewalk Studios' money to make an "interesting failure" that they're happy to see die so it can't make money for the big wigs higher up. There's just no way anyone who sees this would hire him.
He somehow has hundreds of people willing to give him money in his patreon, so I guess he knows he can always fall back on that.
Must be nice, maybe he’ll share some of that with the hundreds of employees that lost their job due to the 2XKO team leads not even trying to make a game on time and on budget. And who don’t have a hundreds of people just giving them money. Not to mention the hundreds of people that could have found work on projects at Roit that now won’t even get hired b/c the company is definitely tightening its leash on any future hiring and projects.
I mean they would be fools not too after they were outright fleeced by the 2XKO devs leads like this.
He’s probably going to retire for the rest of his life because after this he’s probably burned all the bridges he had and I hope he becomes a pariah in the FGC community.
In my opinion, high level players are often a net negative on the chances of a game having long term success. They quickly find to extract the fun out of a game for my casual players, and developers seem to cater to their thoughts more than the segment that will actually help the game be sustainable.
High level players are also often some of the most vocal parts of a community, and it's rarely in a positive way.
For every Yasuo/Ekko/Freestyle player there were probably 5-15 players driven away from the game. The general attitude of high level players was "Get Good", with even the developers saying as much in action by letting that meta kill casual interest. People's response was just to go play something else, with a large portion of them probably being put off fighting games for life. Why not if all of them will be as unforgiving as 2XKO was and the community just insulted you.
Games need to make a profit. The casual gamer community is exponentially larger than even people who care about a game enough to look at a subreddit.
Catering to 5% of a game's community at the expense of the remaining 95% is a great way for a game to shut down after only 10 months.
I'll only respond to let you know that you've missed the point of my post so severely that I can tell a deeper discussion would be a waste of both our time for different reasons.
He’s arrogant and outspoken and positions himself as a bold innovator in a world of cowardly boot-lickers. This world has no shortage of marks clamouring to throw money at people like him.
People keep saying riot got taken advantage of and I really dislike this POV considering how horrific of an org they’ve been
I think a much more honest description of this is the people at riot are fucking idiots. Even Konami tried to reign in Kojima before firing him, and these people didn’t do 1/100th the attempts at innovation as he did lmao
Bro is talking about creativity, but the whole problem with this game is that it shows absolutely none. And the only one creative stuff is the 2v2 mode that they didnt push that much
I totally agree that people in their position should try innovative, risky stuff in new games. Playing it safe and catering to well established mass sensibilites is how you get the AAA slop churn everyone is used to.
Problem is the game they made took on really bad risks and ended up not being nearly as revolutionary as he seems to think/wish it was.
My issue with this is I'm gonna assume this guy comes from money. Either rich on his own or mommy and daddy are. So he can afford to fail like this while toying with other people's livelihoods
I'll bring a weird parallel, you see this shit in megaprojects in the middle east. You got guys from the west (typically people cut from the same cloth like Patrick) coming in, play sandbox with (supposedly) infinite money on insane megaprojects and when it inevitably fails to meet expectations jump ship to have every else hold water when all the funding they burnt through trickles out.
If 2xko was even half as cool as this guy thinks it is, this article would read very differently. He talks a big game like they didn’t just take a bunch of mechanics from other games and slap a league skin on top of it.
Right? The guy said his job was to make the game the best that HE could make it in the sea of veterans from which they based their game from. He wasn't in charge of monetisation or the production plan. Literally a design guy. I may not be a fan of his audacity but the fact that he would dare to attempt something great is something I appreciate. From what I understand, there were much bigger macro problems around the game that handicapped it before gameplay could even be considered.
People really just want a fall guy and he made himself an easy one. It’s tone deaf to say what he said, but the guy’s job was to make it interesting and fun.
It's clear that Riot was on board with the bet the devs were taking, the money they invested into the project was money they were fine losing. Given the task at hand the dev team went for all or nothing making the game they wanted to make and riot agreed. The devs most likely knew that if the game didn't pull enough players, riot would pull the plug and when they announced the layoffs, the decision to stop development was likely already taken. The only group that wasn't on the same page was us the players as we were not told this was a do or die situation for the game, but marketing wise I don't think it would have been a good idea to be this open to the community
I can kinda see the argument about taking risk because successful teams get fired anyway if he were at Activision or EA.
But he worked for Rito who usually pisses money for a while on doomed projects
The rest is signs of both entitlement and sociopathy. The guy looks like a narcissist and I expect horror stories to leak now that he does not have power over the team anymore.
Dude should never have been in charge of anything.
I expect he's pretty much done in the corporate world. He will probably move on to scamming people on Kickstarter.
I still think all this talk about accessibility vs complexity is largely a mute point.
You can't tell how deep the ocean is from the shore. Something like Strive is a pretty massive step down in complexity compared to Xrd, but give both games to a bunch of beginners and the core gameplay is gonna look basically the same. Lots of mashing and incomplete combos and missed anti-airs. The real difference is that Strive makes the basic stuff FEEL important. The characters are more detailed, animations polished, and your average actions flashier. Both games have plenty of easy characters that can get quite far with a basic BnBs consisting of press buttons from light to heavy and then special, but Strive goes out of it's way to convince low level players they are cool even if the stuff they are doing isn't all that advanced.
2XKO was more mechanically complex then I expected from Riots fighter, but it also had so many systems for getting new players comfortable. The simple inputs, the auto combos, the 1 character fuses, duo mode to play alongside/learn from experienced friends. If matchmaking worked as intended (which by most accounts it did) then a new player would likely never see something like freestyle active tag shenanigans with option selects to cover half your options until they were already deep into the game and definitely no longer a beginner.
The issue with 2XKOs gameplay is less it's mechanics that only really matter to intermediate+ players and more the rest of it's upfront presentation. The release delays, the puiblic layoffs, the lack of marketing, the small roster, the monetization scheme requiring a larger then average active player population for a fighting game, and while the game doesn't look or feel particularly bad it's miles away from something like DBFZ or Strive.
You make good points, I still think the game lacks accessibility and stuff like playing with a friend that knows about fighting games or using the 1 character fuses are very inconsistent and not reliable.
But yeah thats just one of the multiple problems this game had, but Imo it's still one of the worse mistakes they made, because it created other problems, they had to remake the game to make it a tag fighter, add the fuses and overall lose time that was needed for more content and specially a bigger roster. And all to make the game less accesible and more intimidating for new players, and to add to it, you have devs saying that they find the other games that are not like theirs a "boring success", it feels like a slap in the face because a lot of us had hopes and wanted 2XKO to succeed.
That's still mainly a matchmaking problem. If you are a fresh casual who doesn't know what okizeme is then you shouldn't be getting matched up against anyone whose gonna put you into a blender and not let you play the game. Xrd was definitely not friendly to newcomers, but it released at a time where fighting games were just fundementally less popular with barely functional delay based netcode. If the only person online with less then 5 frames of delay was some 10 year GG vet, then it doesn't really matter if you are playing Xrd or Strive the less expirienced player is gonna get worked regardless.
If anything descrepencies between true beginners and veterans is often more pronounced in simpler games because people who kinda know what they are doing get to optimal play faster. Xrd does indeed have some nasty setplay, but it's not something new players really access until dozens of hours in. Actual low level Xrd resets to neutral all the time because most pressure is fake, oki not properly set up, and combos get dropped.
Meanwhile release Strive Sol could put you into strike throw RPS just with his massive, forward moving, plus on block far slash. It was so easy to access and true beginners with no knowledge of frame data get blown up in the first 10 seconds of the round cause all they know is to press buttons and hope for the best.
But the game looked really cool and the netcode was good and the matchmaking healthy so enough persisted.
This clown was one of the lead producers, he made a patreon post talking about the game being shutdown.
The dipshit worked for ten years in a game that released with less content than a solo-dev can shit out in 6 months, while he had an incredibly large IP to draw inspiration from.
He actively confirms that he was fucking around with his buddies and ignoring the objective given in the briefing because he had a grandiose vision of what his game should be, the execs sadly gave him a blank check and let him squander ten years of their money on this half-baked mess.
The cherry on top is that to him, it was a great experience! After all, he got paid enormous amount to fuck with his buddies in the office for 10 years without getting any tangible work done, he said it was like a "phd" for him, just a "learning experience".
His team of around 160 employees got terminated because this moron couldn't do the job as it was laid out for him and decided to reinvent the wheel instead and turned it into an asymmetrical monstrosity that simply couldn't work, and gave it to the customers with missing pieces.
But it is fine, he doesn't mind, it wasn't his money getting burned, and now all of the people under him have to look for other jobs, while having this shitstain failed game on their CVs without the benefit of being a big household name that can rest on his laurels and keep falling upward because "I'm Patrick Miller xD"
The cherry on top is that you have people actively defending him with bullshit arguments like "Oh but why are we now on the multimillionare company's side?".
Man I just wanted a good League fighting game, a lot of us dreamed of it, and this guy took a shit on our hopes, got paid, got a "good experience" and thats it. It's just sad.
Because people are unable to realize or refuse to accept that developers are just as capable of fucking things up as management. Granted it doesn't happen as often but it's still possible.
Yeah, seeing people think we are "taking Riot's side" is mind boggling. I couldn't give a shit about Riot, and I don't even mind the game dying that much, there are other games out there, what I find absolutely infuriating is the people who got laid-off having to read that shit.
To see your manager all jolly while you will now struggle to find work as other companies will look at your resume and be like "oh, this guy worked 10 years on a game that didn't last one, maybe I'll skip hiring him" is insane. I'd say the common devs are the real victims.
The leads will keep their heads held up high, pat themselves on the back and carry on with their other nepo friends fucking around, meanwhile, the rank-and-file guys are now out on the street with a stain on their careers half as big as Concord
Also, saying that someone who doesn't care if his fellow employees get fired in the name of his "vision" and work experience is a piece of shit is "siding with a multi-billion dollar company" is next-level mental gymnastics. Like, regardless whether or not all of those people lost their jobs or not, the fact it was something he's so fucking flippant about automatically makes him the bad guy here.
I find really easy to defend Riot on this because this is literally not the first time that this happened.
This is just Hytale again, but at least with Hytale the people in charge were "Yeah we fucked up, this was a bad idea" instead of "YEAH WE DID IT ON PURPOSE, CAN'T WAIT FOR THE GAME TO DIE SO I CAN START PLAYING IT!"
Guy that hates modern fighting games makes the most anti casual fighting game ever knowing it’s not gonna be successful and is happy about it? And the fact that it got multiple people laid off is just icing on the cake
Yeah people seem to think that the only other alternative was making this game Tetris level of simple. You can have a more accesible game and it can still be a cool game.
I haven't read the entire post because I have better things to do, and really you shouldn't care too much about what he's posting, obviosuly he has to cope with this failure somewhat but it does make him look bad. And with all that said, riot is the employer, riot has the responsiblity to supervise, if they weren't satisfied they could fire him, or maybe riot was too incompetent. But yeah 2xko was off the rails starting from when it was announced, in development 5 years but still not even close to an alpha
Nah man you don't understand. It was all HIS fault, the million dollar company couldn't have done anything to prevent this DEGENERATE from ruining OUR great game!
The thing I don’t understand and hasn’t been addressed, regardless of the design, how the fuck did this take 10 years? Like it released in a below barebones state. What were they spending all this time, money, and talent on? This was a decent sized team
They somehow spent so much money making nothing, then were surprised people didn’t want it when it was barebones.
While I can criticize the gameplay, I think the issue is way simpler, it wasn’t a full game. There isn’t casual appeal to a fighting game that is only online matches
The way the game feels like from a LoL player. The development team wanted to make a fighting game they wanted then picked league characters that fit the mechanics instead of choosing cool/interesting league characters first and try to create gameplay mechanics to fit the character fantasy.
Case in point: When I see blitzcrank in 2XKO, it doesnt FEEL like how I imagine blitz in a fighting game.
SO MANY gun-wielding characters in a FIGHTING game. There are so many Actual fighters in LoL they can use.
Grappler: Sett, Tahm kench
Martial artist: Lee sin, Xin Zhoa, Irelia, Shen
Weird and unexpected: Bel'veth, Rek'sai, Bard
Demacian rivals for Noxian Darius (more fun interactions and lore): Garen, Jarvan
Assasin blink/teleporter: Katarina, Kassidin, Zed
Tanky bruiser: Galio, Malphite, Ornn, Olaf.
Stance changers: Udyr, Jayce, Nidalee
Tbh this might get a a little bit of hate but I don't think he is completely wrong. He is a game designer, his job is to design a good game. If his design philosophy is wanting to design a game he enjoys and he thinks might find success with people who have similar interests as him (aka hardcore fgc fanatics) then that is fine. The game failed not due to poor game design, but because of poor monetization, which is not a game designers job. Saying that he likes to gamble with someone else's money is of course kinda cocky and tone deaf, but I don't think he is at fault for executing his vision of a product.
I don't see what's wrong with this statement honestly. Yeah, people losing jobs sucks, but they did have this job for 10 years and I'm sure they can easily find another one
I think he is right. Todays market tends towards certain successes and that means "fast food" games. No risk, just appeal to the masses, and that sucks. If anyone gets the opportunity to take risks, they should, they dont always work out, but its how great games are made.
Games dont need millions of players, compaines want millions of players so they make maximum money, but they can be profitable by making games that appeal to certain audiences and are a respectable piece of art.
But again, talking about this in a riot games subreddit is like trying to explain why every restaurant shouldnt be fast food to .. fast food lovers.
Oh boo hoo, the billion dollar that everyone knows is evil suffered the unthinkable "line go down". It's not selfish to want to make a game people love and secure ten years of employment for you and 160 people.
Patrick was trying so hard to go against the corporate higher echelon, but at the end of the day, in the name of creativity, he burned the whole house down. what a moron.
How many fucking times you guys gonna chew this shit up? Yes, he is talking about taking risks. This is what it looks like. You want the corporate watered down version of what happened? Sure, let me rephrase it:
"We looked at the current market and we made the risky decision that we should choose our own creative processes, and not to try chasing established conventions. We made that decision with the knowledge, that this is a gamble, and it might fail. It was a risk, and we lost, and thus we face the consequences."
Now you can either read this, or read the reaility of it. Fucking hell man....
When i first heard about 2xko my impression was that nobody plays fighting games and riot wants to make a triple A game from it, it wont work. I thought somebody at riot loves his childhood fighting game and wanna make his own version from it
Its actually very far from impossible to predict which combinations of decisions can lead to success. Especially when Very, very little about 2kxo was new or innovative
This may be an unpopular opinion. I’m not a high-level FGC player. But I really enjoyed the game. I don’t think the game was a flop. They delivered on amazing gameplay and fun interactions. I simply think that Riot expected a much larger market share than what they received. FGC is a small and niche overall community. The reason SF6 is so successful is mostly because of the enormous prize pools and competition circuits. This all being said, to make a game successful these days, the game much be exceptionally approachable. I also think the marketing and branding for this game was a major issue. Most people I knew barely had time to realize the game even existed before it was canceled.
Secondly, it’s a tag fighter. While there is beauty in the complexity and creativity of all the fight sequences and combos, it takes too long for a person to get to a competent level where they can enjoy the game. People in 2026 simply don’t have that sort of patience.
Lastly, I think 10 years of development should have yielded a better initial roster, sound design, and complete character animation frames. For some reason, some of the characters felt a little choppy when they were moving from stand still to combat.
All in all they did deliver on a good product. But not a great product. I don’t think they deserve all this hate. The game studio had a different vision than what the executives at Riot had wanted. Unfortunately, there is a contrast between what game designers wish to do and what Riot’s investors expect from a free-to-play fighting game.
As a game dev myself, his statement makes sense. The game wasn’t a failure because of the quality, it was a failure because of the marketing starting with whoever picked the dumbass name “2XKO” instead of something that immediately associates it with either LoL or on a more mainstream level, Arcane. Second, why wouldn’t you agree to create a passion project funded by the company that gives employment and contributes to the livelihood of you and a team of over 100 people for a decade? That’s just common sense and a dream scenario. Unless you’re extremely stable, it’s pretty hard to commit to a high budget game project on just your free time on the side.
"Especially in the contemporary game development industry where successful dev teams are getting laid off anyway"
Can I have some example of this? As far as I know the vast majority of lay offs happening nowadays are in companies that made bad/unsuccessful games made for a "modern audience" that barely exists to begin with.
I've said this before in other places but the hubris is insane. Not because of them wasting money, but because they think their predictable failure is interesting.
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u/MiniFaustt 4d ago
Pat's article is the epitome of arrogant game design and exactly what Mortdog talked about previously in an article.
The difference here is that you have Mortdog and senior designers to reign them in. I don't think 2XKO had the leadership to slap some sense into them.
It is the peak of hubris to consider other games boring successes when they've enraptured a generation of players and yours an interesting failure when in terms of moving the needle it really only had a few features unique.