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If you’re an MMORPG fan who’s been waiting patiently for news of Riot Game’s swing at the genre, then I’m afraid you’ll probably have to wait quite a while longer. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill announced that the project has been “reset” and won’t appear for “likely several years”, with one of the main reasons being a “need to do something that truly feels like a significant evolution of the genre”.
Over on a Xwitter thread, Merrill explained that Riot had pulled the plug on the MMO “some time ago”, because it was too similar to other MMOs and didn’t feel like it brought anything new to the genre.
“We don’t believe you all want an MMO that you’ve played before with a Runeterra coat of paint; to truly do justice to the potential of Runeterra and to meet the incredibly high expectations of players around the world, we need to do something that truly feels like a significant evolution of the genre.”
To mark the reset, Riot are bringing on Fabrice Condominas as the MMO’s executive producer. He joined Riot as its production director in 2021, and was previously lead producer on EA’s Star Wars: Squadrons, as well as Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda.
Merrill goes on to say that Riot will be “going dark” for several years, before rounding things off with a “no news is good news”. On the one hand, yes it seems like this is a positive change and no news may indeed be good news. But on the other more pessimistic side of things, you could argue that no news could lead to a similar thing happening: Years of going dark, then an announcement saying that they gave it a swing but ultimately couldn’t come up with a compelling MMO.
To be totally clear, I do hope the new MMO finds success if and when it launches. I used to be big into World Of Warcraft and dabbled in Final Fantasy XIV, but I’ve been after something new for a while. Whatever “new” means, I don’t know. But I’d love an MMO set in League universe that doesn’t feel like a full time job where you’ve got to login every day to complete your daily quest quota.
A reset does seem like what’s needed, especially after the game was announced with an offhand Tweet four years ago, then its executive producer Greg Street left Riot earlier this year before beginning work on a new fantasy MMORPG under his own studio.
In other Riot news, they finally announced that their fighting game Project L would be getting a name… but not a good one. And let’s not forget that they were also part of the mass layoffs hitting the industry, having laid off “around 530” people and shut down their Riot Forge label earlier this year.