MMO League of Legends: where is the Riot project in 2026?

Six years. It's been six years since Riot dropped a tweet to say "we're working on an MMO" , and since... not much concrete. No trailer, no gameplay, no official name. Just LinkedIn recruitments and vague statements from Marc Merrill on Twitter.

And yet, the project is very much alive. Better: Riot has just hired several heavyweights from World of Warcraft, including Brian Holinka , the former lead combat designer of WoW. When you hire the guy who designed PvP and classes in WoW for years, it's not for a small mobile project.

We have gathered everything we know — the facts, the recruitments, the official statements, and the few credible leaks — to provide a complete update on this Runeterra MMO in June 2026.

To understand where the project stands, you have to go back to the beginning. Here's what happened year by year.

2020 — The announcement. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, former lead designer of WoW at Blizzard, confirms via a tweet that Riot is working on an MMO in the Runeterra universe. The excitement is immediate. The guy who worked on WoW for years is going to make the LoL MMO? The community is on fire.

2021-2022 — The silence. Two years almost empty on the communication side. Riot is recruiting massively — game designers, artists, network engineers — but shows nothing. A few job offers hint at a persistent open world with action combat, but that's it. The community is starting to get impatient.

2023 — Ghostcrawler is leaving. In March 2023, Greg Street leaves Riot after nine years. He cites personal reasons — family losses, the need to be closer to his loved ones. He ensures that the MMO is "in good hands" and went on to found his own studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle. Except that his departure leaves a huge void: he was the public face of the project.

2024 - The reboot. This is the turning point. Marc Merrill, co-founder of Riot, announces that the team has reset the project . The reason? The first version looked too much like existing MMOs. Merrill talks about "a significant evolution of the genre" and warns that the team will "pass into the shadow for probably several years" Fabrice Condominas, former producer at BioWare (Mass Effect 3, Andromeda), takes the helm as executive producer.

2025 — It's moving forward in silence. Merrill says that the MMO is one of the projects he spends the most time on. He talks about a "best direction" and a "good momentum" Still no date, but the message is clear: the project is not dead.

2026 - WoW recruitments. At the beginning of June, we learn that Brian Holinka, Raymond Bartos, and Orlando Salvatore — all veterans of World of Warcraft — have joined the MMO team at Riot. This is the strongest signal in years.

The reboot in 2024 is the most important moment in the entire history of the project. And for once, Riot was rather transparent about the reasons.

Basically: the first version of the game was too classic. Marc Merrill said verbatim that they did not want to "an MMO that you have already played with a coat of Runeterra paint" The problem is that under the direction of Ghostcrawler — a guy who spent his career on WoW — the game naturally took a very WoW-like direction. Holy trinity, hub quests, dungeons, raids. Not necessarily bad, but not different enough to justify a new MMO in 2026.

Riot wants to do something that redefines the genre. Easy to say, obviously. But the fact that they had the courage to start from scratch rather than release something lukewarm shows a certain level of ambition. Or perfectionism. Or both.

The new project manager, Fabrice Condominas , comes from BioWare. He worked on Mass Effect 3, Andromeda, and Star Wars: Squadrons. An interesting profile — more focused on storytelling and immersive worlds than pure MMO. This fits with Riot's new direction: creating a living Runeterra world, not just another WoW.

This is probably the most reassuring aspect of the project in 2026. Riot does not recruit just anyone.

Brian Holinka arrived in early June 2026 as the main game designer. At Blizzard, he was the lead combat designer on WoW — the guy responsible for PvP, class balancing, arenas. When you know that combat is the what makes or breaks an MMO is a weighty recruitment.

Before him, Riot had already recruited Raymond Bartos and Orlando Salvatore , also some former Blizzard employees. Add to that Fabrice Condominas (BioWare/EA) in production and Vijay Thakkar as technical director, and we have a team that has collectively worked on WoW, Mass Effect, Star Wars, and League of Legends.

It's not trivial. Riot could have recruited indie profiles or less known studios. There, they went to look for people who have run the biggest MMOs and RPGs on the market. The message is quite clear about the level of ambition.

Warning: a good part of the gameplay information comes from before the reboot of 2024. Since then, Riot has neither confirmed nor denied anything. That's what was on the table, with the necessary reservations.

The world: Runeterra. That's confirmed and hasn't changed. The world of LoL with its regions — Demacia, Noxus, Ionia, Freljord, the Shadow Isles, Zaun, Piltover... The lore is massive, and Riot has spent years developing it through Legends of Runeterra, Arcane, and comics. There's plenty to fill an open world.

The fight: action, not tab-target. Ghostcrawler had indicated wanting an action combat rather than automatic targeting like in WoW. With the recruitment of Holinka — who comes precisely from WoW PvP — one can imagine that the combat system will mix action and strategic depth. But nothing confirmed post-reboot.

The roles: tank, heal, DPS. The holy trinity was mentioned in the original plans. Does it still hold after the reset? Mystery. Riot wanted to move away from the classic model, so it's possible that the roles will be rethought.

The content: dungeons, raids, housing. The pre-reboot plans mentioned dungeons, raids, player housing, customization, transmogrification, and even fishing. Classic for an MMO. The question is what Riot will keep from all of this in its new vision.

The eco model: free-to-play. Riot has been doing F2P forever. LoL, Valorant, TFT, Legends of Runeterra — everything is free with paid cosmetics. It would be surprising if the MMO deviates from the rule. The team had also emphasized on the "no pay-to-win" and respect for the players' time.

The honest answer: no one knows. Riot has never given a date, even approximate.

What can be guessed is an order of magnitude. The reboot was announced in early 2024, and Merrill said the team was going "pass in the shadow for several years" . Several years from 2024, that puts us in a window 2028 at the earliest . And frankly, 2029-2030 seems more realistic given the scale of the project.

An MMO is the type of game that takes the longest and is the most expensive to develop. Blizzard spent over 5 years on WoW vanilla. Amazon struggled for 7 years with New World. Square Enix literally rebuilt FFXIV from scratch. And Riot chose to start over (almost) from scratch in 2024, after 4 years of work.

The positive point is that the technical foundation built between 2020 and 2024 — under the direction of Vijay Thakkar — probably has not been discarded. The engine, the netcode, the world building tools... all of that can serve as a basis for the new vision. It's not a restart from scratch at the tech level. It's the creative direction that has changed.

If you want a bet? First concrete announcement (trailer, official name) in 2027-2028 Closed beta on 2029 . Launch in 2030 . But these are only estimates based on the usual dev cycles - Riot can very well surprise in one way or another.

Let's be clear for two minutes. The graveyard of announced and never released MMOs is gigantic. EverQuest Next, Blizzard's Titan, Amazon's The Lord of the Rings MMO (canceled then relaunched)... The genre is a financial and technical abyss.

But Riot has some cards that others did not have. First, the IP The universe of League of Legends and Arcane is massively popular, with millions of fans waiting to be able to explore Runeterra in an open world. It's not a universe that needs to be sold — it's already sold.

Then, the money . Riot belongs to Tencent, the largest video game group in the world. Budget is clearly not an issue. League of Legends still generates billions each year, and Valorant is a hit. Riot has the means to finance a project of this scale for a decade if necessary.

And then there is the team . Veterans of WoW, Mass Effect, Star Wars. It's probably the most impressive lineup of developers ever assembled for a non-Blizzard MMO. It doesn't guarantee anything — good devs can make bad games in bad conditions — but the potential is there.

The main risk? That Riot gets lost in its perfectionism. By wanting to "revolutionize the genre" so much, they might never release anything. Or release something so different that the MMO community doesn't recognize it. This is the central tension of the project: being different enough to justify its existence, but familiar enough to attract a massive audience.

It does not yet have an official name. Internally and in the press, it is referred to as "MMO Runeterra" or "MMO League of Legends". The code name and final title have never been publicly disclosed.

No official date has been announced. Community estimates revolve around 2028-2030, but Riot has not confirmed anything. The project was rebooted in 2024, which inevitably pushes back the schedule.

Very likely yes. Riot has never released a paid game - LoL, Valorant, TFT, and LoR are all free-to-play. The team has also emphasized a non-pay-to-win model, based on cosmetics.

Marc Merrill explained that the first version looked too much like existing MMOs. Riot wanted to create something fundamentally different, not "a classic MMO with a Runeterra paint job." Hence the overhaul of the creative direction in early 2024.

Fabrice Condominas (ex-BioWare, Mass Effect) has been executive producer since 2024. Brian Holinka (ex-WoW, lead combat designer) joined the team in June 2026 as principal game designer. Marc Merrill, co-founder of Riot, closely supervises the project.

No platform has been officially announced. PC is almost certain given Riot's DNA. A console release is possible but not confirmed. Riot has already ported games to mobile (Wild Rift, TFT), so a mobile version is not excluded either — but nothing concrete.