Akali and Senna revealed as next champions for 2XKO as Director discusses future of the game
This week came with the unfortunate news that Riot Games is laying off around half of 2XKO’s development team, but it seems there’s still quite a bit more content in the works for the title.
Riot just revealed the next two champions coming to 2XKO‘s first year while also discussing new features and the future outlook of the League of Legends fighting game.
In their latest weekly blog, 2XKO Director Shaun Rivera teased Akali and Senna as the newest characters joining the game in the coming months.
Akali is the next fighter coming later in Season 1 though we only get to see a handful of seconds of action for each upcoming addition here.
League’s Rogue Assassin is shown off slinging around her roped blades and teleporting across the screen.
Senna will then likely kick off Season 2 with her powers over light and shadow as well as huge cannon because as an abridged vampire once said ladies “love cannons” (though I can’t use the exact quote here).
Gameplay clip previews for Akali & Senna in 2XKO. pic.twitter.com/Idcxynm2mP
— Fighting Game Anniversaries (@FGAnniversaries) February 13, 2026
These reveals could be seen as Riot attempting to do some damage control following the layoffs, but the team is at least openly talking about what they’re doing with the game.
There’s no mention made as to how the reduced team is going to impact development moving forward, however, Rivera shares three main points they’re focusing in on.
Duo play is the first subject where the devs are finally working on a Local Duo Mode that lets you play couch co-op with a partner, and while they say they’re working on getting it into the game ASAP, it’s not ready just yet.
Core gameplay is the next section where Rivera addresses some of the concern he raised over previous statements about changing the gameplay experience with some “big swings.”
“We’ve seen the conversation about what our core gameplay could or should look like in the future, and we want to clear one thing up. We love that 2XKO is fast-paced, allowing your reactions and creativity to shine while providing a ton of depth to dig into. The skill ceiling of this game is high, and that’s where it’s gonna stay.”
“We’ll continue making balance changes that hit outliers in the meta while keeping the sauce of every character. At a high level, we want every champion to have defined strengths and weaknesses, and right now that’s not clear enough across all of the cast.”
Yasuo and Ekko are unsurprisingly two examples of fighters that still don’t really have enough pronounced weaknesses which are brought up here.
Finally, Rivera discusses 2XKO’s community and competitive programs, and it sounds like they’re actually about to try something pretty cool and unique.
2XKO’s team is working on a program that will give local tournament organizers access to exclusive in-game prizing that can’t be obtained anywhere else though they do go into detail as to what those prizes could be — but it’s still a neat idea to receive a special skin or title for topping your local.
On top of that, Rivera states they are still working on fixing the screen tearing issues in 2XKO on console as well as refining their Ranked online mode.
It’ll still probably be a while before we see more of Akali and especially Senna in action, but now we know 3 out of the 5 champions planned for 2XKO’s first year since Caitlyn joined at launch.
This should cover the character releases for the first half of 2026, so we’ll have to wait and see who the final two are going to be.
The development team certainly has their work cut out for them, however, there’s still a lot of passion and talent that are trying hard to make 2XKO a success for Riot and the players.
We would of course like to hear more about the impact of the layoffs and how the game is being monetized, but that’s probably not going to happen with Riot.
At least the 2XKO devs are remaining very open in their communication with the community as to what they’re working on and looking at, and you can find their full blog post below.
— 2XKO (@Play2XKO) February 13, 2026
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