2XKO has been a staple of Evo for the last three years, but the finish line (or perhaps the true starting line, depending on how you look at it) is finally starting to come into view on the horizon. A closed beta has been announced for September 9, and after that, the servers will remain up all the way until launch, whenever that may be. The game has changed a lot since it’s first iteration, and even since its first appearance at Evo, and there are even more changes in store for the Closed Beta. To cover some of these changes, and to get a breakdown of the newest character, Vi, I talked with lead champion designer Alex Jaffe, after going hands-on with the latest build for myself.
You’re launching a closed beta on Sept. 9 and have announced that the servers will remain live until the game launches. First off, how does that feel? Can you sum up what you’re feeling at this significant milestone in 2XKO’s long life at this point?
Alex Jaffe, Lead Champion Designer on 2XKO: I appreciate you asking, because it’s very much an emotional thing for so many of us. We’ve been working on this game for a long time. I think people know. People have been waiting, right? We get it. We are the same way. We just want people to have the game. We just want them to play. And, years of my life, I have just been waiting for this moment, right? So when you make a game, you’re there to bring joy to people.
And so, we knew that we were heading towards the closed beta, but the day we announced it, I got to tell you, my spirit’s lifted in a way they haven’t in a while, because it just feels so real now. And, having people here at EVO playing it, everybody signing up for the beta, soon they’re going to have it home and they’re not going to have it taken away from them again. They’re going to have it. And they’re just going to keep on playing forever, hopefully. And I just cannot wait to have more and more people playing the game, and hopefully having a great time with it, and learning from them, and improving the game for all y’all, hopefully.
I’ll tell you what, as someone who played the Alpha Lab, and then had it taken away from them, I did feel like it was a major slight against me.
Jaffe: Absolutely. We’re just practicing a little bit of cruelty just for no good reason. No, I’m just kidding. No, we know there’s work to do, right? If you played Alpha Lab, hopefully you had a fun time with the game. But, there was a lot that was incomplete. And we have been grinding, we have been in the lab working on the game, so many little details, trying to add more content, but also, I was looking at the changes that our core rules team and our live balance team put in, just in Alpha Lab 2, and it’s just massive. So many problems are being fixed. So many good solutions to make more situations in the game more interesting, more fair. I’m just so proud of everyone on the team.
Well, let’s talk about those changes since Alpha Lab 2. What were some of the major pieces of feedback? I know you can’t go through every little bit. But what are some of the major bits of feedback that you got from Alpha Lab 2 that you’re addressing in this closed beta?
Jaffe: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll speak first about core roles, which is not my team, but it’s the team I work very closely with, of course, because I work on Champions. So one of the things we saw in Alpha Lab 1, we saw that the game was really long combos, a lot of pressure, just like it was hard to get your turn. It was hard to get agency and get to act. And again, you want to play the game. At the same time, a lot of it is about taking control and being able to style on your opponent. Finding that build or middle ground is what we’ve been working on. Alpha Lab 2, in some ways, we swung the other way, right? It was too hard to get your offense started, unless you knew very, very specific routes to get Oki, for example.
[Editors Note: Oki, or okizeme, is a term used to refer to the offensive options you can use while the opponent is getting up off the ground after a knockdown]
And, I know the combos were too short there, but there were ways in which people felt like there was maybe some overcorrection. And I think, we really hit a great sweet spot in this one. So some of the changes we made, we improved damage, so that rounds don’t go on so long. People were just like, “I want to get through the round. Finish the game, get into another one.” But, there was maybe too much healing, not enough damage, we have less gray health building. All these things to make sure that a round is fun, fast, and gets to the point. We also changed the way our knockdown system works, so that it’s possible to get really, really offensive mix-ups and set ups on your opponent. But they’re not freely available as a vortex where you combo into it over and over and mix up. We have our throws forward throws and air throws. They’re hard knockdowns. But, you don’t get a hard knockdown off of combos anymore. You do get these roll opportunities. You used to have rolls in there, but now, the rolls can be thrown to be punished. So roll doesn’t get you out of pressure.
So a lot of just somewhat subtle maybe to an unfamiliar player, but really, really central to someone who’s playing the game hard in terms of making sure that it’s fair and interesting. Oh, meter changes too, one more thing I want to mention. Pretty big. You start the round with one bar of meter, so you can just get going, and hit your super, and get right to the fun stuff. You don’t start with a full bar of your team meter anymore, which is your break. So you can’t break that first combo that your opponent’s doing to you, right? We want to make sure you get your combo in, you’re not just waiting for the second one. So it’s all a lot of tuning. It’s all subtle stuff. But I think it just results in more fun games that go quicker where there’s more back and forth between players.
Let’s talk about Vi. Vi Is the new character that you just introduced. And, I got to play with her. She’s super fun, very much my style of character. As someone who plays Giovanna in Guilty Gear Strive, I just love being able to quickly dash in and out. What is Vi’s kit, basically? What was the idea that you wanted to hit with this character?
Jaffe: Absolutely. Yeah. So Vi is a character that is really, really beloved, even before Arcane, right? League players love her. But Arcane really brought her into these upper echelons of iconic characters. And, obviously, we looked at her, her power is in her fists, right? And we knew that there was a good chance she would be somewhere in the boxer zone. Boxers are just a classic archetype in fighting games. But we wanted a new twist on it and we were just really looking at what we could do with her.
And for us, it was really about getting some of that technicality of boxers, where really precise movement, a lot of really interesting strings, but also, some of that just raw power fantasy of these Hextech gauntlets, right, just mashing your opponent with huge hits, hitting the ground, making blasts of energy, and tying those two things together, I think, weaving them together was the goal. And, it took a while to get there. We definitely went through many iterations on her before we found that perfect sweet spot. But we were super happy with… I think, what that lets you do is it lets you make a character that’s easy to get into, because you’re like, “Damn, she hits hard.” Right? Very much from the beginning, right? She’s smashing you to the ground, charging up that S1 punch, and hitting you for full stream.
But, the real core of her kit is her footwork, which is this dashing special you mentioned, where you can weave in and out and you can cancel it into different follow-ups. And these follow-ups have so much flexibility. You can charge one and then not charge the other, charge another, cancel charge one into any other S1 special, link that into another footwork, and you’ve got this really nice dance for combos and her pressure structure, I think, look just really beautiful and feel really expressive and great on the hands. Yeah, I’m super proud of her. It seems like people are having fun time with her out here.
One of the things I noticed about her is that she is so fast, blisteringly fast. It’s already a very fast game. Her mix-up or cross-up potential is super, super high. What would you say are some of her weaknesses though? It seemed like she might have some trouble getting in on somebody who’s trying to zone her out.
Jaffe: Yeah, absolutely. And we do have tools to deal with that, but the idea is, look in a game 2XKO, there’s a lot happening. There’s a lot of hit-boxes on the screen. Everybody has to have some way to… We talk about just get their **** started. You know what I mean? I’m sorry. But, yeah. So that means sometimes it means projectiles, right? You’re casting power across the screen. Sometimes it means, “Hey, I’ve got armor to go through.” Right? Like Darius’s reversal. And sometimes, it just means “I’m so fast that you can’t even prepare for my approach.” And that’s definitely Vi’s strong suit, it’s surprising movement, getting right in there, but she has to make it through whatever the battery of defenses. And, she does have some projectile invulnerability to do that. But yeah, it can be challenging. Even I was playing a set with someone today, and her footwork dash can go into a slide that crosses up. You saw that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
She just passes through. And I was playing with someone who was just mashing jab when I started to go into it. And, I’m screwed there, right? If your opponent knows what you’re doing predictably, there are really strong answers to Vi. You have to keep it flexible. You have to use some of her unorthodox air tools to change her movement up. You got to be using back and forth movement, not just all aggression. So definitely, she is a very strong character, but she’s fighting, in some ways, inherently an uphill battle against characters with bigger hit-boxes or with projectiles.
So the landscape of the tag-fighting genre has changed substantially in just the last year.
Jaffe: Oh, has it? What happened?
[Laughter]
I just wanted to get your thoughts on the genre and what it feels like. You used to be the new kid on the block, the only kid on the block.
Jaffe: Now we’re the old new kid on the block. I get it.
And now, all of a sudden, all these kids have moved in.
Jaffe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
What’s that feel like?
Jaffe: Honestly, it’s exciting in a real way, because everybody on this team loves tag fighters, and there were a jerk of options for a while. And, we’re making this game because we think that this is one of the most mind-meltingly enjoyable experiences you could have on planet Earth. And so, we’re genuinely psyched that there are more options out there and that there are going to be more people playing tag fighters on account of multiple games coming out. And it’s really cool just seeing them, everyone’s taking very different takes on it.
The Tokon folks were super nice and welcomed us in to play this morning, me and another designer, Caroline. We only played and we had a great time. The game’s very different than ours. The pacing is different. The way team play works is very different. I think there’s both room to enjoy both of them, or just different audiences will like different ones. So I feel great about that. I haven’t got to play Invincible. Yeah, super excited to play that.
It’s super fun.
Jaffe: Yeah, and Hunter x Hunter is awesome. So it’s a wild time from there to be so few, to now, so many. But, I think, it’s inevitably going to bring a lot of people into this kind of peak experience. So we’re excited, and we want people to play our game, and enjoy it, and in general, to play tag games to enjoy them.
Coming back to the closed beta, do you have any sense of how long you want this closed beta to last? Or is it just a thing of when you feel like the game is ready, that’s when you’re going to flip the switch?
Jaffe: Yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t think I have a very satisfying answer there, for two reasons. One, because I personally don’t know exactly what the plans are at the top level in terms of how we do that, because I’m working on making the game. That’s my focus, right? And in particular, as running the champions team, it’s all about that character factory, making one amazing character after another to the extent we can. That’s our goal, right? So my eyes and my team’s eyes are firmly set on the next character, the one after that, and the one after that, just making them amazing. In terms of the process, what we’re going to learn from the closed beta, I’m sure that’s the goal, right? We want to see how the game does out there. We want to see how people enjoy it, what works and what doesn’t.
And, I’m sure I could say that the duration of it does depend on how confident we are with what we’ve got. So far, we’re loving what we have here, but it’ll be different once people have it at home. That said, I don’t actually even know exactly what the bounds of how short or how long that could be are. I’m sure somebody else does, but no matter what, we don’t want to wait too long, right, before expanding the game as much as we can, because we just want it out there, we want people playing it. And, how long it’ll be, I can’t say really. But, fingers crossed, not too long.
Final question. For anyone that played the first two Alpha Labs, maybe felt like they had a good feel of their character, are they going to jump into this new closed beta and be like, “Oh, this is way different”? What are some of the biggest changes to some of the other characters that are going into the closed beta?
Jaffe: Absolutely. Yeah. So we have a lot of changes on the rules side and some more strategic changes on the champion side, as well as some tuning. It’s actually cool because we’ve had our live balance team start coming online and start participating in the process of working on the Champions, because in some sense, we’re doing live balance on champions that have actually existed in the wild for a while, even though it’s only been in temporary tests. So they’re working on the champs and collaborating with the champion designers, like our live balance designer, Yohosiei, to just make them more pristine. And, some of the change is damage, whatever, recovery. But some of them are more significant. Darius?
Darius has a fireball now!
Jaffe: Darius got a projectile. It’s got a nice little ground projectile. It’s not the strongest thing in the world, but it has real strengths. He can use it to approach. He can combo off it sometimes, OTG (off the ground) with it. It just gives him more tools to play with to be a more full and expressive character so he can have more fun with him.
Illaoi, we’re very excited about a subtle change. Illaoi, she really relies on getting her tentacles out to start her game. Because once she’s got tentacles, she can pressure with them, she can combo with them, she can mix the opponent up with them. But, we wanted her to have that physicality, so she can’t just summon them. She has to hit you to generate tentacles. That said, it was really hard for her to start that game from far away, like we talked about. So we found a great compromise, which is her down S2 is now chargeable. Her down S2 is the move where she punches her totem into the ground and a tentacle comes up and it generates a tentacle for. Now, if you charge that, it will auto-track the opponent’s position. So they have to fear that low from anywhere on screen if they’re being patient and just sitting there. So it lets her express power from far, get the tentacle out and really get her game going.
Beyond that, just a lot of tuning changes. Yasuo has pretty different routes in a bunch of places. But most characters, Darius, or Braum, Jinx, their routes are pretty similar. Some changes around the way corner. But mostly, you might have to relearn a couple of things, especially at the advanced level, but you’re going to be able to get in there and play your character mostly as you used to. And, we’re making bigger swings right now. But as we get closer and closer to the whole complete version of the game, we’re going to slow down that rate of change, so that we’re not disrupting people’s muscle memory too much.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
