Riot’s Got One Last Surprise for 2XKO: Sett Joins Samira on October 27

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026

Just when the 2XKO community had made its peace with the ending, Riot Games slipped one more card up its sleeve. On October 7, Riot revealed that Sett — the pit-fighter brawler, the fan-favorite, the one nobody saw coming — will join Samira in 2XKO on October 27, arriving as part of the game’s final content update, Patch 1.3.3, on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The roadmap said Samira was the last champion. The roadmap was wrong.

Let that sink in for a second. This is a game whose active development is ending in December 2026 — a sunset Riot announced back in August — and the team still found a way to ship a whole extra fighter nobody asked them for. According to Insider Gaming, the remaining dev team built Sett in just six months. And he was reportedly leaked accidentally on the official 2XKO site earlier in October, which means the surprise was almost spoiled before Riot could stage-manage the moment. Almost. They got there first, barely, and the reveal landed exactly the way these things should: as a genuine shock.

The sentiment from the team is real. 2XKO game director Shaun Rivera posted on X: “Everyone on our team wanted to give you all one last surprise. They not only poured their love and passion into Samira, but also managed to find a way to do the same with Sett as well. They are both so fun, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on them. Much love.” Read that again and tell me it doesn’t hit different knowing the team is being wound down. “Managed to find a way” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence — it’s the sound of a skeleton crew refusing to let the game end on a shrug.

The fightersSwordplay and gunfire meets pit-fighter brutality

So what are players actually getting on October 27? Two very different flavors of violence. Samira is the stylish one — swordplay blended with rapid gunfire, the League of Legends marksman translated into tag-fighter form. If you know Samira from the MOBA, you know the fantasy: relentless, flashy, always moving forward. In a 2v2 tag fighter, that kind of pressure character is a gift to anyone who likes their offense suffocating.

And then there’s Sett. Heavy punches. Throws. Close-range grappling that turns the corner of the screen into a very bad place to be. Sett’s whole identity in League is the pit-fighter — the brawler who walked out of the fighting pits of Ionia and decided the rest of Runeterra could catch these hands too. He’s been a fan-favorite pick for years precisely because he’s uncomplicated in the best way: get close, grab something, end the round. In a tag fighter, a grappler who can tag in, command-grab your point character, and tag out is the kind of problem the whole meta has to solve. The lab monsters are going to have a field day.

Together, Samira and Sett complete the roster at 18 playable characters — a full, honest roster for a game that, by every conventional measure of the industry, had every reason to stop at 17 and call it a day.

The bigger pictureA sunset with unusual grace

To understand why this surprise matters, you have to remember what Riot told us in August: active development on 2XKO ends in December 2026. The servers stay online indefinitely. All champions are unlocked free. Cosmetics got bundled into a single Ultimate Bundle ($39.99 / £33.99 / €39.99). And every purchase made on or before August 20, 2026 is being refunded — Riot is literally giving the money back.

That’s an unusually graceful way to wind down a live game. Most sunsets in this industry look like a server shutdown notice and a gift-shop fire sale. Riot’s version looks like: keep the servers on forever, make everything free, refund the players, and then — with the clock running out — ship one more fighter anyway, built in six months by the people who are losing their project. I’m not going to pretend the ending isn’t sad. But there’s a dignity to this one that the genre doesn’t usually get.

The reason for the ending, though, is the part the fighting game community can’t let go of. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill — “Tryndamere” — said 2XKO needed “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of monthly users to be sustainable. The FGC’s response was swift and near-unanimous: those expectations were unrealistic for a fighting game. And they have a point. Fighting games are a niche genre with a passionate core — even the biggest of them don’t do “millions of monthly users” as a matter of course. Holding a tag fighter to MOBA-scale numbers was always going to end exactly one way.

Which is what makes October 27 feel like a quiet rebuttal. The game didn’t hit the number. The team is being wound down. And still — still — they built Sett in six months and kept it secret, because the players deserved one last surprise. That’s not a business decision. That’s love. You can argue with the strategy that killed 2XKO; it’s a lot harder to argue with the people who refused to let it die quietly.

The gameWhat 2XKO was — and what’s left

For the uninitiated: 2XKO is Riot’s free-to-play 2v2 tag fighter set in the League of Legends universe. It entered Early Access on PC in October 2025, came to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S in January 2026, and shipped with cross-play and cross-progression across all of it. The pitch was always accessibility without shallowness — a fighter that could onboard League’s massive audience while giving the FGC something real to chew on. Our esports desk has been tracking the competitive scene all year.

On October 27, that game gets its 18th and final champion — one the roadmap never promised, built in half a year by a team that knew the clock was ticking. If you ever meant to try 2XKO, this is the moment: the complete roster, all of it free, servers staying up, and one last surprise waiting at the end. The Boss is coming to the pit. Don’t keep him waiting.