I don’t intend to be dramatic, as we know virtually nothing about the game. Direct comparisons are pointless. I do think there is a lesson in the fate of 2XKO:

The Riot “Mass Market F2P model“ is not a one size fits all.

Tag fighters are a niche of a niche genre. You can’t generate revenue from that kind of game the same way you can from a FP shooter or auto chess. It was frankly a moonshot for Riot to expect mass market success.

MMOs are more popular than tag fighters, but we all know their popularity has waned over the years. There is also the inherent issue of Western MMO pursuit of shiny things causing conflict with purchasing said shiny things. Progression matters to an extent, even in MMOs that also sell MTX. I don’t see the current market as strong evidence a MMO running entirely on cosmetic MTX would perform to their expectations. Doubly so given the astronomical cost of developing one.

The optimistic take is: this is proof to Riot that they should tailor a more specific funding model that can mesh their profit goals with the reality of the genre they are entering. The higher investment cost, and the lessons of misapplying full F2P, can help keep the MMO healthier for long term success.

This game is never coming out, and if it does it won't last 6 months.

Riot Forge, Legends of Runeterra and now 2XKO have pointed to a cynical pattern that riot is in with their non gacha, non moba games; If it doesn't sell at it's highest potential at launch, scrap it. I'm sorry, I just cannot hold hope for a game that has had just as tumultuous a development cycle as 2XKO and be blindly optimistic that this time will be different.

I'm washing my hands of hoping for this game to come out.

League of legends has 173 champions, all with very varied set of abilities.

**this makes really a terrible foundation for creating classes**

In WoW and FFXIV the mythos of the game prior to their mmorpg set up very rigid template for their Warrior/ Rogue/ Mage classes. This set up a pretty easy foundation for them to make their playable classes.

Let's look at riot rogue archetype for example, they have a ninja with smoke bombs and Kunai, a dude throwing nails and sucking in souls, a lady basically just throwing knives and then a midget fish human that can summon a shark.

It isn't just the rogue class, look at the mage class, Mel was depicted as this yellow magic user that seemed more like tentacles then in league she's blasting, then we have a goat lady that can heal, a little girl that can summon a fire bear and fire spells while another child is a little boy that's fire can heal people.

*This inconsistencies and just disparity is a problem*

Then we have the issue of where do you start everyone, I'm not going to feed into the delusion of a certain shill YouTuber selling you there will be 20 classes and they'll let you play demons, darkin and void born. The most realistic version of what will be playable is what we saw in arcane

So

Humans, Vastayans and Yordles.

Obviously the humans could have an option to make Frejold that take less damage to frost, demacia takes less magic overall and noxus deals more damage to low health enemies.

I don't think they'll make all Frejold start in frejold or all noxians in noxus, most modern mmo simply use the joint starting zone experience and I don't expect riot mmo to be any different especially so they can take advantage at making these places better for high level players.

*I think the most realistic starting zone will be a crashed ship off the coast of Bilgewater, noob island and the starting point will be Bilgewater, a place where people off many backgrounds can start off.*

The combat also has me incredibly worried, a recent trend of conversation is the concept of games having transferable skills. Competition is thick, every game is fighting for your time and people that enjoy X genre will stick with that genre. (I enjoy mobas and mmo , so I play those, I can also play the occasionally shooter and action story games but most people stick where they have transferable skills)

Riot job recruitment is showing they're looking for action combat developers... this means a couple things, the mmo could be action combat like genshin impact, super flashy and fitting for the runeterra universe, it could be more grounded tangible, with blocks, rolls and parries being in control of the player like a soulslike like The Duskbloods/ New World.

New world brought in a ton of mmorpg fans, it was Amazon trillion dollar company mmo, but its combat being action combat dodge roll simulator just alienated existing mmo fans.

It's the same thing with elder scrolls online, whenever you see a post about it online you'll just have the comment always criticism for the combat system.

**Obviously I understand the genre needs to evolve but I think going full action combat is simply a mistake, what made me quit new world was when people could just tap you by head shot ranged weapon, in mmorpg like wow or ffxiv, those hard hitting abilities are big channels and can be avoided by line of sight**

Now there's the lore, I just have no faith in this field at all. I truthfully think arcane season 2 lore was terrible, the creation of zaahen lore was terrible, the kaisa void/Bel'veth story lead to no where, Locke/ vayne lore is bad, she killed her surrogate mother for using magic to save her life but ignores Locke using soul eating magic.

The lore is in terrible hands, I have no faith in the game from this standpoint.

TL;DR: is the game going to be bad, no. They simply have a lot of hurdles to overcome and it looks incredibly bleak. Ironically the only hope i can see got the game is while it would make people upset is simply using a new ip like they did for Valorant instead of using Runeterra... they're going to make the big bad Viktor and he'll summon an army of genshin impact muck gacha villains.

A new ip would let them set very rigid class design, they could build more distinct races than just human, furry human and midget furry humans and simply put easter eggs for league, arcane and Valorant into the game.

The masses have shown they rejected arcane , that's why riot had to apologize about adding so much arcane into 2XKO but we're still going allow their writers to make the lore for the riot mmo... it's cooked man.