2XKO Devs Explain How Design Decisions are Made and Plans for 2026

2XKO is back again with another Weekend Warmup, and as always, it's quite illuminating about some parts of fighting game development that are usually painfully opaque.

Specifically, this time we have Draggles talking about the release of Akali and plans for 2026, while Yohosie, the balance lead, elaborates on their future patch goals and the decision-making involved in balancing a fighting game.

As always, you can see the full post down below, but we'll briefly run over the main takeaways here.

Starting with balance, you can expect 2XKO to scale down the character changes, and shift focus to system changes for the upcoming patches. Champions are in a pretty good spot overall right now, but the game is still dominated by Handshake Tag being good on offense, defense, and neutral. 

Alongside changes being made to Break and meter, the changes to Handshake Tag will likely have massive impact on the game balance, so the adjustments to Champions needs to be a bit more conservative to avoid creating volatile situations.

You can expect a relatively quiet period of low impact changes while developers allow things to settle and see how system changes affect the meta. Especially since they will soon introduce an entirely different type of fuse.

And speaking of fuses, while developers are aware of Freestyle being quite strong, they want to ensure that it's first and foremost fun to use. As such, any adjustments to it will need to try and balance things out while retaining the elements that make Freestyle so fun to use.

Now, when it comes to making decisions, Yohosie outlines 3 main factors:

• Eyes - Developers watch a lot of their own game and analyze how characters are performing. This includes watching not just tournament footage but also fighting game streams.
• Hands - Naturally, they also grind the game out to get first-hand experience, figuring out what's not fun to play against or what might simply be powerful but healthy.
• Data - Looking over the pick and win rates of different characters. Pick rates are especially important here, because few select players can influence winrate of less popular characters, yet a 50% winrate char having a super high winrate indicates that they are a "must have."

There's a lot more nuance that goes into balancing a fighting games, but as Yohosie puts it, their philosophy with 2XKO can be summed up with a poetic statement.

Now, as for the future of the game, 2XKO recently posted a handy graphic of all you can expect in 2026. Most notably, there will be a sixth character coming to the game in 2026, and you will soon see a new Fuse type and a way to find Duo partners within the game.