2XKO is out right now in Early Access, with a healthy ten-character roster and a gaggle of stages available for its first wave of players. This, obviously, is only the beginning for the 2v2 fighting game, with Riot promising five new characters a year starting in 2026. That’s more than Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 offer in their annual season passes.
So why can Riot do what Capcom can’t, and is this a pace that’s sustainable for a relatively fresh-faced team? Given the amount of time it took to get to ten characters, can we expect the same level of quality from future fighters as we’ve seen with the original cast? To keep this character treadmill going, how many new characters are in the oven right now?
To find out more, I spoke to 2XKO lead champion designer Peter Rosas at Evo France earlier this month. The first fighter Rosas worked on for the game was Warwick, the 10th fighter introduced alongside the early access release. After all, who could better describe the pace at which new characters are made than a key designer on the latest addition?
So let’s start with Warwick. According to Rosas, the early design for Warwick was done before he joined the team in 2024. Rosas was thrust straight into the process of figuring out how Warwick would actually play, a process started alongside another fighter with a similar play style.
“When I was initially thinking of Warwick, we had space for a super rushdown character. Vi was in her design phase and she was also a rushdown character, but more scrappy, more what you’d imagine a boxer would be from other games. So we wanted to make sure with Warwick that we’d make a rushdown character but different.”
Rosas continued: “So when we looked at reference points for Warwick from different mediums, we saw that agility came into play. So we had an opportunity to make a character that was more dynamic, that could come at you from various angles. That was the big idea at the core of Warwick – making a rushdown character that was different from Vi but that felt vicious and hyper-aggressive.”
The result is a character with a relatively unique “catch and release” playstyle, as official gameplay breakdowns dub it. Warwick has to rush in to maul you, cashing out big damage with explosive specials that send you flying away, restarting the cycle all over again. It is significantly different from Vi, who instead focuses on staying close and making opponents guess between a variety of powerful punches.
So as the game gets older, how does the team plan to grapple with a problem that’ll only get more and more complicated. They’ve made two distinct rushdown characters, but how do you make three? Or five? Or eight? Rosas remains confident in the team’s ability to keep things fresh: “It’s a challenge our team would gladly step up to. I think there are a lot of ways to recognise a rushdown character depending on the ability set we’ll provide for whatever future characters show up. The other aspect to it is team synergy – sometimes we’ll make characters that leverage team play a little bit more. That’s another tool we look at to differentiate a little bit more.
“But there’s a lot of ways to separate rushdown characters. I have the utmost faith in our design team to create those characters, they’re very experienced in fighting game background and knowledge of the genre.”
Rosas stated that Warwick’s development was on the faster side, though didn’t specify how long it took when asked, nor how long the design process from early concepts to a game-ready build has taken for new characters scheduled to release next year. He did say that newer characters are built even faster than Warwick, but again, didn’t state how long Warwick took to get to a playable state.
So with that context in mind, we look now at the five-characters-per-year promise at the heart of 2XKO’s future release schedule. As mentioned previously that’s more than Street Fighter and Tekken, genre classics with decades of team experience developing fighting games. When asked how confidant he was that the 2XKO could keep up the pace, Rosas was bullish:
“Our team is confident, we wouldn’t go out with that number if we weren’t. Our design team is getting stronger and stronger with getting designs done faster and faster. We have a large roster to pull from, we can see how players are interacting with the current roster of characters, see what’s strong. So we can take those factors into account when creating new characters to make sure important elements are present, while making sure each character is unique and true to their thematics.”
Whether or not the 2XKO team can live up to this promised pledge, while retaining the impressive degree of depth present in each of the game’s existing characters, will likely be core to the game’s longevity. If the team can pull it off, then the already popular fighting game newcomer might just have what it takes to knock some legacy giants off their pedestals. If it can’t, one wonders if the fledgling team has bitten off a bit more than it can chew.
