Riot Tries to Explain Why 2XKO Has One of the Worst Names in the Genre

Few things united the fighting game community quite like the name reveal for Project L. For once, it didn't matter who your main was, what rank you are, which game you think is the best, whether you're oldhead or a newhead, on stick or leverless, everybody was making fun of 2XKO.

It has that satisfying mouthfeel of chewing on a handful of thumbtacks, but more importantly, it feels so hollow and corporate. It has the vibe of those logo rebrands where personality and charm gets sucked out in favor of "professional" and serious minimalism.

You might intuit from the title that it's a tag/vs game, but it's so deliberately generic that it doesn't evoke or convey anything. It's like someone making an RPG and calling it LVLUP.

Oddly enough, for last week's Weekend Warmup, Riot decided that it's time to explain why the name is good actually, or at least why it seemed like a good idea.

It already starts off with a bit of a red flag, at least on the official website, where the article description riffs on French Bread's rather eccentric titles with "it should have been called LeaGUE [of] Fight-3rz:TEEMO-[XD]."

FGC has made jokes about in the past, but it was never because the name is bad. Something like Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late [cl-r] is not exactly elegant, but it matches the games vibe and it's cool in a sort of earnest but dorky type of way.

When it comes to 2XKO, instead of trying to come up with something that would capture the game's feel and sound interesting, Riot came up with the most LinkedIn naming convention I've ever seen. After discussion what the game meant to the leadership, they outlined following naming pillars, in order of importance:

• Social aspects: duos, lobbies, IRL play, locals
• Progress-minded: something new, fresh, previously-unseen
• Tonally tough: aggro, bold, in-your-face
• IP-inspired: Runeterra, League of Legends terms
• Fighting game terminology: VS, attack, block

You could stretch the meaning of these to say 2XKO has a lot of these, aside from being IP-inspired, but on the surface, it's just a combination of the least important (KO being a common term in fighting games), and most important (2X representing the duo format). 

While "2XKO" is not a very conventional name, it's hard to call it bold and fresh, given how it almost feels engineered to be flavorless when compared to other options they had on the table. Outlining "super ownable" as a big pro of the name doesn't help the corporate allegations either.

Fighting games are a pretty passionate genre, so a name this cold, detached, and devoid is personality will never really stick. Not to mention the horrendous "2X" shorthand.