Project L demo: "We're here to learn from the players" The story behind Riot's unexpected hands-on showcase

Project L exploded onto Evo this year with a public demo – seemingly out of nowhere. For years, those interested on the mysterious goings on within Riot HQ have been left with crumbs, occasionally getting real news but left with little else to do than speculate and create lists of characters we'd like to see in a game we knew very little about. Yes, we were guilty of that too.But within the course of a week, we went from background information to real hands-on impressions of Riot Games' next big release. I was curious on the decision to suddenly drop a demo on people, and the philosphy behind the surprise fourth addition to the roster: Yasuo. To help guide me through these points, I sat down and talked to Alex Jaffe at Evo 2023 to find out more in our third and final Project L interview piece from Evo 2023."We've been working on this game for many years, but we started to become aware that we would be working on an Evo demo in the last year or so." states Jaffe, resting his legs while sitting on the carpet of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas. "This Evo demo – there are some specific things we built for it like the flow of the build and how you get in and out of the game – but honestly this is the first crystalization of the way we want the game to play. So when we say we were working on the 'Evo build', we were really working on locking down systems in the game so they're working pretty close to how we want them. Read more