Riot Apologized for TFT's Rough Unreal Switch. Its MMO Job Listings Ask for Unreal Too, and Riot Admits It Launched Knowing TFT Wouldn't Feel the Same.

What Happened

TFT's move to Unreal went worse than Riot expected, so its executive producer apologized on camera and put the repair backlog on a public website.

What went wrong

• The old engine. Teamfight Tactics, Riot's auto-battler, ran from 2019 on Hextech, the in-house engine it shared with League of Legends.
• The new one. TFT moved to Unreal, the Epic Games engine, with Enchanted Wilds, the eighteenth TFT set, in late August.
• What broke. Riot says the switch "felt worse than expected, due to performance and bugs": missing cosmetics, delayed shop interactions, frame drops and crashes.
• The opening line. Geoff, TFT's executive producer, opens the five-minute video Riot posted on October 13: "We told you TFT would feel the same after the move to Unreal. It didn't." (0:00)
• The written recap. Riot's text version, "TL;DW: Follow The Fix Update", says instead: "We knew TFT wouldn't feel the same right away when we moved to Unreal".
• The apology. "That isn't the experience we promised you. And we're sorry," Geoff says at 0:12.

Why Riot launched anyway

• The question. Geoff asks it on camera: "If we knew there was still work left, why did we launch?" (0:25)
• One delay already. Riot pushed Enchanted Wilds back once, which pulled Space Gods, the set before it, forward with "less time to polish" than planned. (0:50)
• Space Gods paid. The squeeze cut development time for that set's mechanic and design, and "as a result, was less popular with players," Geoff says. (1:02)
• Nothing in reserve. Delaying again "wasn't as simple as just giving Enchanted Wilds another few months," and "we didn't have another Set in the old engine waiting to go." (1:15)
• Leadership's call. Developers had flagged the bugs and unconverted cosmetics; "myself and others in TFT leadership chose to launch with them and we take responsibility for that." (1:39)
• The PBE miss. Riot "took more confidence from the game's performance on PBE than we should have." PBE is Riot's public test server. (1:52)
• At live scale. Across "a much wider range of PCs and phones," Riot saw crashes, frame-rate problems, input delays and memory issues "at a scale we hadn't expected." (2:04)

Follow the Fix

• A public backlog. Follow the Fix, a Riot website launched with the video, "shows players nearly everything remaining on the team's backlog," with regular progress updates and a feedback button, Riot posted on X.
• Why it exists. "We don't want players to have to wonder what we're working on, so we're putting it out in the open," Riot wrote.
• The priority list. Stability and crashes, frame rate, input responsiveness, champion movement and targeting, pings, repositioning, mobile responsiveness, visual clarity and cosmetics.
• Not every bug. The site won't list every bug, and fixes for a set's gameplay bugs stay in the patch notes.
• The cosmetics count. The outlet RiftDaily counted 2,661 of 3,573 cosmetics converted on October 7, leaving 912. That is a single source: Riot's page loads in JavaScript and we couldn't read it directly.
• Furthest behind. In that count, Little Legends, the player avatars, sat at 165 of 796 converted, and Mythic Arenas at 6 of 36.
• A thank-you. Riot is "working on a couple of things around Set 19 to thank you for the patience," with details to come. (4:33)

Why Unreal

• Two builds. "We were reaching limits in our old engine and in some cases building the same experience twice: once for PC and once for mobile," Geoff says. (0:37)
• Still the right call. "We still believe moving TFT to Unreal was the right long term decision. That doesn't mean we got every decision along the way right." (3:57)
• Borrowed experts. Unreal specialists from the Valorant and 2XKO teams, Riot's shooter and fighting game, helped with the move, GamesBeat reported in June.

The response

• The reach. The @TFT post carrying the video passed 561,000 views.
• One outside voice. Necrit, a League of Legends lore YouTuber, quote-posted it: "Despite what state TFT is in right now, this is the most transparent thing Riot has ever done."

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Riot has never named the MMO's engine, but its MMO job listings ask for Unreal, so TFT's migration is the nearest public look at Riot moving a Runeterra game into that engine.

• No engine announced. Riot has never said what engine the MMO uses; the Unreal link comes from its job listings and a developer's hiring post.
• The tools role. A Los Angeles listing, "Staff Software Engineer, Unreal Tools - MMO", asked for "custom Unreal tooling" and tools experience in "Unreal 4 or 5". It is no longer on Riot's careers site.
• The animator post. Alex M. Lehmann, a creative management director on the MMO team, asked in April for a technical animator skilled in Anim Blueprints and Control Rig, both Unreal animation systems.
• An engine team. Riot's careers site lists "Unreal Ecosystem" engine roles in Los Angeles and Sydney, alongside its MMO openings.
• The UX listing. A Sydney listing for a senior UX designer on the MMO, posted September 14, asked for Unreal Engine familiarity.
• The caveat. The MMO's live rendering listing names "Unreal, Unity, etc." only as example engines.
• Ship or reset. TFT launched knowing it wouldn't feel the same. When the MMO was reset in March 2024, Riot co-founder Marc Merrill said "the initial vision just wasn't different enough".
• The conversion question. TFT's backlog is Hextech-era cosmetics being rebuilt for Unreal. Riot hasn't said whether the MMO reuses any existing art from its other games.

Our read. If the MMO is in Unreal, as these listings point to, TFT's miss is the one to study. Geoff says what Riot got wrong was "how rough the overall experience would be once Unreal reached everyone, and how long it would take us to improve things." An MMO launch carries that same risk at a bigger scale.

How Riot answered the miss matters too. An apology on camera and a public backlog with a feedback button are a model the MMO team could reuse for its own tests, though nothing Riot has said commits it to that.

Your Take

Read Next

Reported from Teamfight Tactics (Riot Games) and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.