Riot Games has been making a concerted effort in recent years to expand the reach of the League of Legends universe. Between the company's own first party titles like Legends of Runeterra and the creation of Riot Forge for third-party developers to create original games based on League, Riot has brought several new ways to experience its flagship series over the past two years. One of the most highly-anticipated of these additions to the franchise has been the fighting game Project L, recently receiving a new trailer re-introducing the game to fans.
Project L was one of several new entries in the League of Legends franchise announced during the game's tenth anniversary celebration in 2019. Alongside Project L, Riot announced the League-themed card game Legends of Runeterra, the tactical shooter Valorant, and a fully animated League of Legends series in Arcane which recently concluded its first season. After being announced during the presentation, however, Project L had mostly gone silent without many details on the fighting game released over the next two years.
Coinciding with the celebration surrounding Arcane's finale, Riot Games released a new video re-introducing fans to Project L and taking a deep dive into the design process of the game's development team. Executive producer Tom Cannon and technical lead Tony Cannon use a similar mantra with regards to Project L as Riot has often used with League of Legends, describing the fighting game as "easy to learn, but hard to master." While the trailer showed off some of the game's flashy assist-based fighting combat, Riot did confirm that Project L's release was still a distant way off.
Cannon stressed during the trailer that Project L is very much still in the R&D phase of development, signalling that players looking to take the reins of Ekko or Jinx in the fighting game will still be waiting for a while. A '/dev' blog post coinciding with the trailer's release confirmed that the game would not be releasing in 2021 or until at least late 2022, confirming two updates planned for 2022 with the first coming early in the second half of the year.
Project L's re-introduction is just one part of the massive festivities Riot has held to celebrate the airing of Arcane's finale. The "RiotX Arcane" event has brought several new additions both to the core League of Legends experience and the franchise as a whole. Riot Forge officially released one of its inaugural titles, Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, earlier this week and League of Legends recently ushered in the newest pre-season, introducing a swarm of gameplay changes and updates. Though fans will still be waiting some time for Project L's release, Riot Games continues to push out plenty of content to keep fans of League of Legends satisfied for years to come.
Project L is currently in development with no confirmed release date.