Riot Games, Inc., the developer of League of Legends officially announced its in-development MMORPG. This upcoming video game will be set in the League of Legends universe, also known as Runeterra. Fortunately, the upcoming Runeterra MMO has been in development since 2020. It does not currently have a name. In fact, Riot Games, officially refers to the upcoming MMO as, ‘Unpublished MMO’.
Riot’s MMO will likely be influenced by traditional MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. According to Greg Street, former Director of the upcoming MMO, the game will include features such as
- Classes / Job roles
- Gear progression
- Bosses
- Raids
- PvP and more.
Table of Contents
Scope of The Game
Based on our analysis from the Riot MMO recruiting page, the scope this game will be massive. They plan to staff a large team. Furthermore, they do not see m to be underestimating the resources required to properly develop a completed MMO. By reading the Riot’s recruiting page for the unpublished MMO, one can safely presume the Riot MMO is an ambitious project.
Furthermore, Greg Street (previous VP and EP of the Riot MMO) described the upcoming game as a “monumental undertaking where player expectations are sky high.”
Added to these ambitious words, the Greg Street feels comfortable with Riot’s allocation of funding for the upcoming game. Simultaneously, Riot is not willing to fund the game nonchalantly. If the game director can justify the additional expenditures needed for further development, he states Riot would be willing to support the project further.
What We Know So Far
How the Riot MMO was Announced
The Riot MMO has been in development since around late 2020. The game director is Greg Street. Also know as Ghostcrawler on Twitter. Being so early in development, information on the upcoming MMO is scarce. Initially, most of our information will come from Greg Street.
On December 17, 2020, when Ghostcrawler announced Riot Games’ in development MMO, he finalized his tweet with “PS We’re hiring”. Around the same time, a Riot MMO Recruiting webpage appeared on Riot’s official website.
Here’s what the page summary says:
“No, you’re not dreaming, we’re working on an MMORPG based in the League universe! We know MMOs take a lot of people to create, and we’ll need a pretty big raid team if we want to bring Runeterra to life. That’s where you come in. We’ll periodically post new roles, but right now we don’t have any specific openings on the team—we’re just gearing up for the journey (and need to replace our greens first). If you’re interested in joining, you can submit your information below.”
https://www.riotgames.com/en/mmo-recruiting
Riot MMO Team is Expanding
Riot Games, published a new MMO Recruiting page on February 22, 2021. They stated they are ‘looking to expand their raiding team‘. Staff such as game engineers, UX designers, game designers, art designers and game producers are all in demand. Because Riot is searching for these roles, it lets us know the team is in pre-production as of February 22, 2021. The game engine is being built up and deadlines are being crafting before associate staff and team managers are brought on. As of February 2021, we could still be anywhere from 4 to 5 years away from launch.
More Riot MMO Info in 2022
In early 2022, there was some confusion between our Runeterra MMO and another in-development ARPG by Riot dubbed Project F. Several websites incorrectly refer to the two separate games interchangeably. A tweet by Ghostcrawler in early January officially debunked this by stating the Riot MMO and Project F and two separate games.
Later that year, on November 10th, Riot MMORPG fans got lucky with an hour+ long podcast style interview with content creator KanonXO and Ghostcrawler.
The interview mostly discusses common gaming industry topics, such as game monetization, core RPG features, Riot’s philosophy and viewpoint towards the upcoming MMO, and Greg’s personal and professional life. KanonXO also uploaded a condensed version of the interview.
2023 and Beyond
Since this major interview, Riot has been quiet about further developments on their unpublished MMO. Until they makes further announcements, fans can only make inferences about the MMO project through Runeterra lore development and speculate and theorize through discussions.
Of course, Riot’s hiring process is, as far as we know, public. Riot’s public job listings may have open listings for what they call, Unpublished MMO. Based on the on the open job postings, we can presume which stage of development Riot might be in.
Mid 2023
In June 2023, the Riot MMO team had an interview with content creation, Necrit. We published a detailed review of the interview. Essentially, the team discussed their vision of the game along with a few other fun tidbits. Overall, we had the impression the Riot MMO was in early the prototype development phase at the time of the interview.
