2XKO is out right now in Early Access, with a healthy eleven-character roster and a gaggle of stages available for its first wave of players. This, obviously, is only the beginning for the 2v2 fighting game, with Riot promising five new characters a year starting in 2026. That’s more than Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 offer in their annual season passes.
So why can Riot do what Capcom can’t, and is this a pace that’s sustainable for a relatively fresh-faced team? Given the amount of time it took to get to ten characters, can we expect the same level of quality from future fighters as we’ve seen with the original cast? To keep this character treadmill going, how many new characters are in the oven right now?
To find out more, I spoke to 2XKO champion designer Peter Rosas at Evo France earlier this month. The first fighter Rosas worked on for the game was Warwick, the 11th fighter introduced alongside the early access release. After all, who could better describe the pace at which new characters are made than a key designer on the latest addition?
So let’s start with Warwick. According to Rosas, the early design for Warwick was done before he joined the team in 2024. Rosas was thrust straight into the process of figuring out how Warwick would actually play, a process started alongside another fighter with a similar play style.