 How's it going everybody? Dottodoy here and I am very excited because today we have finally received a new update on the next big fighting game from Riot Games, Project L. At least that's the working title for the game anyway. All I'm saying is they have things like Legends of Runeterra, Valorant, but they don't have champions. Just a pitch, just an idea. Getting back on the subject of the actual new update we got though, we got a ton of exciting stuff including a really in-depth look at a character we did not know was going to be in the game until this video, Echo. Honestly, that would have been enough to get me excited as Echo was one of my most anticipated characters for the game, but the updates didn't stop there as of course we got to see the updated looks and visuals of the other characters which all look great and we got to hear some more talk from the Canon Brothers about what their focuses are going into this fighting game. On topics such as their philosophy about fighting games and netcode of course was a big subject touched on this video, but let's get into all of those things now. Starting with what I think people will consider the most impressive of all, and that is the sheer visual update and quality. They have definitely found the style and aesthetic for this game and they are refining it to a core right now, but that's not the only area of the game where they've refined the visuals a little bit. They've also really defined and smoothed out a lot of the character animations and how they're going to play, with the biggest example of this to me being Jinx. When they revealed the first four characters of the game to be Jinx, Ari Darius and Katarina, I distinctively remember thinking that Jinx felt very, very forced. For those of you that don't know Jinx in League of Legends mostly relies on two guns, both of which require the use of both of her hands, so you can see how making a fighting game character out of that could be very difficult. This was my biggest worry with the early footage because from the little we saw it did look like Jinx was carrying around her minigun at all times and I thought that was going to make it super awkward to play as her or just even look at somebody playing her. I don't know how it would have looked, thankfully though with this new footage I no longer have any worries concerning that at all and somehow they solved this problem by having Jinx use her third gun, the pistol, a little bit more in her tool kit and yeah I know Jinx has a lot of guns. The pistol though we've seen in the footage so far looks like it's going to act as more of a little bit of a short range sword though. Even if you might not be impressed by that they are still working in the two other big guns and roles that I think more suit their focus. As you can see in this little string here when Jinx goes in with the pistol does some slashes and then uses the rocket gun very quickly to rocket jump up into a little bit of a mix up and then continues with the pistol and then she can also use the minigun to attack from afar. All of these animations are super impressive. The rocket jump one specifically is very fast and if you're not looking close enough I honestly thought Jinx was maybe using a grenade to do this but no she does pull the gun off her back and launch it at the ground to create a little mini explosion to backflip off of. Of course all the other base roster characters look really great as well except for Katarina I don't think they showed her off in this new footage unless I just completely missed her but Darius looked really good and Ari especially had some really cool and interesting and more importantly really long-looking combos that were super cool to look at and it's a good thing that most of the characters are looking as good as they are because this game is now confirmed to be an assist based fighter which could either elevate it or bring it down in Europe depending on whether or not you like fighting games with assist. Personally I do like assist in my fighting game so I am excited for this. I just think it adds a little more dynamic spice and I also just like the feeling of playing more than one character but again that's highly subjective that's gonna depend on whether or not you personally like assist. And now let's get into the philosophy behind fighting game talk and the netcode. Starting with the netcode of course because I think that that's going to be the most agreed upon thing in this entire video. First of all I just want to talk about how good the Canon Brothers are at being the face of this game. They definitely said all of the right things to get longtime fighting game players and new players hyped up to play this game. I just thought I'd bring that up because I think one of the major strengths with this game is going to be how Riot handles the community and with these two on the front facing end honestly I think they have a really good chance of blowing almost every other fighting game out of the water in the communication aspect. Why do I say this? Well when they started talking about netcode for the game they immediately said sure gameplay is important but netcode is also equally important when it comes to great fighting games. Then they went on to say that they're going to use rollback networking at the core and cut a little promo for rollback netcode which was definitely targeted at people that have been playing fighting games for a long time. I assume that players coming over from League of Legends to look at this trailer like rollback netcode what's that fighting game fans heard rollback netcode were like yes that's it was basically a character announcement for us. What got me more hyped though is that they're going to use Riot technology with servers to better connect you with your opponent which honestly has me thinking that this might be one of the smoothest online experiences for fighting games at least in the U.S. I know Riot has servers all over the place so obviously good online that's really exciting everybody hates lag but honestly the best thing that I heard from this little networking session is something that is so easy for fighting game developers to mention and do but somehow none of them ever do and it's just them confirming that when someone disconnects their system will detect who disconnected and give the other player the win. I don't know why more fighting games don't do this. It's such a simple system but I was really glad to hear them talk about this. It's never really rage quitting that I think bothers anybody is when people can rage quit and rob you of either a victory or just get away from the consequences of losing whatever match they were going to lose anyway. But with that we are at the end of everything online based they talk about and now we're going to get into more of their philosophy behind making the game and of course if you've played fighting games for long enough then you already know that this is going to be about whether or not this game is going to have motion inputs. A lot of modern fighting games nowadays are reeling back the motion inputs and Project L is not going to be an exception to that. A big fighting game I play here on this channel Dragon Ball Fighters reeled back inputs in a way that really the only inputs in the game are either quarter circle inputs which are pretty much the most basic and easy to do inputs or down down inputs which are also relatively easy to do. The point being that modern fighting games clearly see inputs as a barrier to entry to getting newer players into the genre and honestly when this first started happening I thought it was a little bit overkill but after playing Dragon Ball Fighters for so long I've come to the conclusion that inputs no longer really matter to me as a fighting game player. To give a little story about how I came to this conclusion honestly it happened when Guilty Gear Strive came out and I was playing with Deon aka Siriax. He's been on the channel a ton. We go back and forth in fighters all the time and I would say our matches are a ton of fun. Then we switched over to Guilty Gear and in our first match he said man I don't know how to do Sol's DP and I just sat there like oh man he's never done a DP input before. This guy's been beating me in fighting games and doesn't know how to do a DP input. That was pretty much what I realized that inputs are not what make fighting games so fun to me. Now I will add to this that I don't like when developers are disingenuous and say that inputs are what cause new players to fall out of fighting games or not fall in love with them or that having simplified inputs are going to help their new players compete with top players because that's never been the case but the cannon brothers here actually acknowledge that and just say that they're trying to make it fun for all levels of play which I totally agree with so it sounds like they have the right mindset going into this so I am completely confident that it's going to work out for the best. The last thing I want to say about this is that I know a lot of people's problem with simplified fighting games is that they often look a little boring but thankfully I've saved the best for last and that is the Ekko gameplay which trust me looks anything but boring. Basically Ekko is a character that relies heavily on time manipulation and they have kept true to that in this fighting game incarnation of him. Every time he uses a chrono strike he creates a duplicate of himself which he can rewind to if he does so in the limited amount of time that it stays up and you can either use it to follow up your strikes immediately or wait a little bit and make a different call. This is such a cool character concept and it is why I was so excited to see him get added into this game. You can use this for all sorts of things including mix ups, mind games, and comboing off of your assist. It is pretty much a gigantic sandbox of a tool and I love when characters have this sort of thing. So just the fact that Ekko is in the game with something like this means that the roster is going to be able to do some pretty crazy thing. They also gave Ekko his time grenade which it looks like he can hit with his bat to launch at his opponents and if it hits the opponent at the right period of time when it activates it slows the opponent down opening them up to even more possibilities. Again this is just another gigantic sandbox of a tool that can be used in all sorts of ways so it really goes to show just how much freedom you're going to have when you're playing a character like Ekko. That was pretty much all we got to see with Ekko but even just that is more than enough to make up an entire character in my opinion. And like I said if one character in the game has open tools like this that most likely means that the other characters in the game are going to have wild things like this as well. Overall I would say after this I am much more excited for Project L than I have ever been and I am looking forward to seeing more of my favorite lead characters added to the game. Obviously with the success of Arcane I expect that Vi and Jace will probably make appearances in the base roster and this might be a conspiracy theory that only I subscribe to but I am relatively sure that they only added set to League of Legends so that they had a fighting game character they could add in Project L later on down the line. Down below in the comments so let me know if you're excited for the game and what kind of characters you want to see get added in from League of Legends if of course you play League of Legends. While you're down there make sure to leave a like if you're excited for Project L and make sure to subscribe to stick around because we are going to be covering it on this channel of course in great detail and playing a ton of it whenever it comes out and whenever we can but other than that you can also check out some videos on your screen right now. I have been Dr. Doyle and I will see you in the next one.