The Mod Everyone Is Sharing
A three-day-old Red Dead Redemption 2 mod gives every stranger a temper and a memory, and its solo author says an AI coding assistant helped him build it.
- One modder. enRage, a fan-made mod for the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar's 2018 open-world western), went up on Nexus Mods on October 17, 2026 from one author, nicklovin99.
- Strangers remember you. Every person you meet gets a temper such as Hothead, Coward or Loyal, a written backstory, and a memory of whether you helped or hurt them.
- Gangs get ranks. Outfits like the O'Driscoll Boys have a leader, lieutenants and captains who move up the ranks and go to war over territory.
- You can interrogate. A wounded gang member can be questioned about his outfit's plans and his boss's camp. The mod page warns that he can lie.
- The world keeps score. A menu tab called World, the mod's running record of events, logs every gang war, killing and act of mercy, and four regional papers print the news.
- AI helped build it. The mod page carries an "AI Transparency" note: "Claude Code assisted in the creation of scripts and systems." Claude Code is Anthropic's AI coding assistant.
The characters in enRage are not chatbots. Their tempers, grudges and gang wars run on rules the author designed himself. What the AI did was help one person write the code for a system that would normally take a team. Keep that split in mind, because it is the whole argument of this piece.
YouTuber Cambll's walkthrough, above, put the mod in front of a wider audience on October 19, 2026. It is early access, PC story mode only, and it changes a 2018 game more than most official updates do.
The Tools Studios Already Have
Talking characters, faces that animate from a voice file and terrain that erodes itself are in engines and demos now.
Characters that talk back
- Dead Meat. Dead Meat is a murder mystery where you question a suspect in your own words. Meaning Machine, the studio that made it, runs the conversation on a small language model on the player's own PC.
- NVIDIA ACE. NVIDIA ACE, NVIDIA's toolkit for AI-driven game characters, powers that model. PUBG, inZOI and Naraka: Bladepoint were announced as its first games at CES 2025.
- PUBG Ally. PUBG Ally, an AI squadmate in Krafton's battle royale that you talk to out loud, went into a Steam beta in June 2026.
- Ubisoft Teammates. Teammates, Ubisoft's experimental shooter shown in November 2025, has squadmates that take voice orders. Its playtest was limited to a few hundred players.
- Worlds from a prompt. Genie 3, Google DeepMind's world model, builds an explorable world from a text prompt at 24 frames per second and keeps it consistent for minutes.
Dead Meat's team told GDC 2025 that cloud language models were a business risk: if players loved the game, the cost of running it "may well exceed the price they paid for it." Moving the model onto the player's machine is what made it shippable.
Tools for worlds and models
- Faces from a voice. Audio2Face-3D, now open source from NVIDIA, animates a character's face and lip-sync from an audio file inside Unreal Engine 5, Epic's game engine.
- Muscle under skin. Unreal Engine 5.2's ML Deformer sample uses a trained model to move muscle and skin on a character in real time.
- Smoke and terrain. Houdini 21, SideFX's software for procedural effects and environments, added machine learning nodes that sharpen smoke and fire and paint eroded terrain.
- Your own art. SideFX's approach is that a studio trains these models on its own work, not someone else's.
The strategy of SideFX here is still bring your own data and train your own model.
— Entagma, a Houdini training channel, New in Houdini 21, Entagma, 5:39, watch
None of these tools make a game on their own. Each one takes a job an artist or animator already does by hand, the lip-sync pass, the muscle pass, the smoke pass, and makes it faster to try, check and redo.
Riot's MMO Team Is Growing
Riot keeps adding people to its MMO, and some of its own job ads already ask for AI tools.
- Nineteen open roles. In September 2026 Riot's careers site listed 19 openings under Riot Discovery Studio, the department building the MMO, three of them saying "unpublished MMO" outright.
- WoW veterans arrive. Riot hired former World of Warcraft producer Raymond Bartos in January 2026, IGN reported, and WoW combat lead Brian Holinka in June.
- AI tools in an ad. A Sydney engineering role on the MMO asks the hire to design "AI/ML driven tools and features" and "solve developer and player facing problems".
- A living-world designer. A 2025 listing for a Technical Game Designer, AI World, asked for someone to "build AI, content components, and encounters that create a living and delightful world".
- A head of AI. Riot named Brendan Mulligan its Head of Experiential AI in June 2026, PCGamesN reported, and he said he would not push AI into workflows to please investors.
- More committed than ever. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill said in April 2026 that Riot is more committed than ever to the MMO.
Read the job ads closely and the AI in them sits next to people, not in place of them. "AI World" in game design usually means NPC behavior, the rules that decide what characters do. The Sydney role is the one that names machine learning tools, and it is a job for an engineer who builds them for other developers.
Riot has said nothing on the record about AI in the MMO. Every hire above is a person joining the team, and the team is still growing.
Tools, Not Replacements
The studios getting this right keep a person in charge of every line, and players notice when they don't.
- Writers steer it. Meaning Machine said its suspects only worked once it stopped asking the model for twists and handed control of the conversation back to its writers.
- Actors still win. Embark Studios used licensed text-to-speech voices in Arc Raiders, its extraction shooter, then re-recorded lines with actors, saying a professional actor is better than AI.
- Consent is contractual. SAG-AFTRA, the US performers' union, ratified a video game agreement in July 2025 that requires consent and disclosure before a performer's digital replica is used.
- Developers are wary. In GDC's 2026 State of the Industry survey, 52% of developers said generative AI is harming the industry, up from 30% a year earlier. 36% use it at work.
- Riot's own misstep. Riot said an AI-made Wild Rift anniversary trailer in 2025 "did not hit the mark", and it keeps a no-AI line on Arcane, its animated series.
- Hand-written NPCs. Lord of the Rings Online gave its housing neighbors 20 personality traits and said no AI writes their dialogue.
It is a magician's trick where the effect of that trick is directly proportional to the human effort that goes into it behind the scenes.
— Meaning Machine, the studio behind Dead Meat, Dead Meat talk, GDC 2025, 47:19, watch
That is the line to hold the whole subject to. AI is a great tool. It is not a replacement for the people who make a game, and the projects that work treat it the way enRage did: one person designs the rules, and the tool helps them build more of it.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Speculative read: a growing team with these tools could build a Runeterra that reacts to you, just as the MMO market needs something new.
- Faster world building. Machine learning terrain and effects tools let an environment team rough out more ground and spend its hours on the places players will remember.
- Faster model work. Learned deformation and voice-driven faces cut the hand work between a finished character model and one that moves and talks.
- NPCs with a memory. The enRage idea, a stranger who remembers what you did, fits an MMO where millions of players pass through the same towns.
- A learning machine. In Blitzcrank's biography, the inventor Viktor puts a hextech crystal in a scrapped waste golem from Zaun, the chemical undercity beneath Piltover, and "His creation was learning."
- Costs that scale. Running small models on players' machines is how Dead Meat kept conversation costs from growing with every hour played.
- A market in trouble. Amazon's New World goes offline January 31, 2027, and Intrepid Studios, maker of Ashes of Creation, closed in February 2026.
- Riot wanted different. Merrill said in March 2024 that the first version of the MMO "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today".
The only thing Riot has confirmed about its MMO is that it is set in Runeterra, the world of League of Legends. Picture Bilgewater Harbor, a lawless pirate port built into coastal cliffs, where a dockhand remembers you skipped out on a debt. Or the Great City of Demacia, a kingdom built on magic-dampening petricite, where a guard treats you differently once word of what you did reaches him.
Blitzcrank's canon already has the catch. The golem "innovated, interpreting and extrapolating on their daily directives," and also smashed down a tenement front to let in one resident who had lost a key. A machine that learns still needs direction. These are our pictures, not Riot's plans, and a writer would still decide what every dockhand and guard says.
Our read. This is the perfect storm for the Riot MMO. The genre's recent launches are shutting down, Riot reset its own game for not being different enough, and the tools that let a world react to its players are arriving while Riot is still hiring the people who would use them. AI will not build the Riot MMO. Riot's developers will, with tools the last generation of MMOs never had.
Watch the Videos
Every clip this piece draws on, in two galleries. Pick a thumbnail, then press play.
- Start with enRage. Cambll's nine-minute walkthrough shows the mod's gangs, interrogations and world log in action.
- Then the talks. The two GDC 2025 sessions explain how studios run AI characters cheaply and keep writers in charge.
- Then the tools. The second gallery covers faces, muscles, smoke and terrain, the jobs these tools speed up.
Living worlds and characters
Tools for building worlds and models
Your Take
Should the Riot MMO use AI tools to give its NPCs a memory of what you did, with writers still in charge of every line?
What to Watch
Riot has dated nothing about the MMO. Here is the hiring coverage this piece builds on.
Reported from the enRage mod page, the linked videos and talks, Riot Games Careers and the outlets linked above. The read on the Riot MMO is ours. Analysis by RuneGrove.
