Source: League of Legends (Riot Games). Verified against multiple sources; datamines and reports are labelled as such, not stated as fact.
Riot Shipped a Second League
League of Legends Classic went live on July 29 inside the existing client: 60 champions on pre-rework kits, the old runes and masteries, and no ranked ladder.
Every long-running online game eventually has to answer one question: when the game moves past the version people fell in love with, do you make them let go, or do you keep the old one running? Riot answered on Wednesday July 29, 2026. League of Legends Classic shipped with Patch 26.15, and it’s now sitting in the client right next to the live game.
Classic isn’t a second download. It runs inside the existing League client, built on a Season 3 anchor with pulls from League's first four seasons, which the dev blog calls “a collection of greatest hits, rather than a singular moment in time”.
60 champions are in at launch, the original 40 plus 20 released between 2009 and 2013, all on their pre-rework kits. The old Summoner’s Rift came back with them, wraiths and faster-respawning buffs included, along with legacy items like Heart of Gold, Atma’s Impaler and Frozen Mallet. Yasuo didn’t make the cut. Riot’s wording is “No Yasuos allowed.”
There is no ranked ladder at launch. Progression runs through Summoner’s Journey, a free track that climbs from Salt through Wood to Legend, and Riot says “only a single-digit percentage of players” will get to the top of it. The launch queue list is short: one PvP draft queue, Co-op vs AI and customs, with a positional preference system.
Riot revealed the mode at the MSI 2026 Finals on July 11 and published the dev blog, credited to Riot Yina, on July 14. The launch cinematic, “Welcome Back, Summoners”, went up with the patch on July 29, drawn in a crude 2D style that plays the joke completely straight.
The launch post from @LeagueOfLegends passed 1.2 million views and 16,000 likes inside a day. For a mode shipping with no ladder attached, that’s a lot of attention.
What's In the Build
The full launch list, the legacy models that came with it, and the two claims in the coverage that Riot's dev blog does not make.
The rune and mastery pages are the part that’ll land hardest on anyone who quit around Season 5. You pick them before the match, the way you used to, and every tier is unlocked from the start, so nothing stands between you and a full page.
- Launched Wednesday July 29, 2026 as part of Patch 26.15, inside the existing League client rather than a separate download.
- 60 champions at launch: the original 40 plus 20 released between 2009 and 2013, on their pre-rework kits.
- A Season 3 anchor with pulls from League’s first four seasons. Riot’s phrase: “a collection of greatest hits, rather than a singular moment in time”.
- Old rune pages and masteries return, pre-selected before the match, with every existing tier automatically unlocked and no grinding required.
- Legacy items are back, including Heart of Gold, Atma’s Impaler and Frozen Mallet, on a recreated early Summoner’s Rift with wraiths and faster-respawning buffs.
- No ranked ladder at launch. Summoner’s Journey runs from Salt through Wood to Legend, and Riot says “only a single-digit percentage of players” will reach Legend.
- Launch queues: one PvP draft queue, Co-op vs AI, and customs, with a positional preference system.
- Riot’s stated design goal: champions have “sharper strengths and weaknesses, missiles and dashes are slower, and there are more stuns”.
- Yasuo is excluded. The dev blog’s wording is “No Yasuos allowed.”
- The dev blog is credited to Riot Yina and published July 14, 2026. The reveal ran at the MSI 2026 Finals on July 11.
The old models came back with the old kits. Blitzcrank stands on the original base stonework, and Evelynn is the pink-and-blue version from before her 2017 visual update.
Two claims in the launch coverage are not in Riot’s dev blog, so treat them as reports rather than facts: that Classic began as a prototype at Riot’s internal Thunderdome hackathon, and that a developer known as Norak, who previously built the fan project Chronoshift, was later hired by Riot and worked on Classic. Riot documents Thunderdome on riotgames.com. The Norak link is press-only, and we haven’t seen Riot confirm it.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Riot now runs an old build beside the live one on purpose, and three of the MMO's most senior hires spent years inside the studio that wrote that playbook.
Start with the cost, because that’s the part nobody volunteers for. Two versions of the same game means two balance surfaces, two bug queues, two content calendars, and two player bases who’ll each tell you the other one is ruining things. Riot signed up for all of it in public, for its biggest game.
Here’s our read, and it stays speculation until Riot says otherwise: a persistent world is where that problem gets worst. A MOBA patch changes a champion. An MMO patch can change the place you live in. When a world drifts past what people signed up for, you either patch forward and hope they follow, or you keep the old world running.
A studio that will stand its own 2013 build back up is a studio that treats a version of a world as worth keeping.
A studio that will stand its own 2013 build back up is a studio that treats a version of a world as worth keeping. We made the same case before launch, when Riot was rewinding League to Season 3 and we called the MMO a bet on the same nostalgia, and earlier than that when we pointed out that WoW Classic refuses to die. Shipping the thing is stronger evidence than announcing it.
The names on the MMO’s senior bench matter here. Brian Holinka spent roughly 11 years on WoW PvP and combat design. Raymond Bartos was a Lead Producer on WoW. Orlando Salvatore was a lead software engineer there. None of them has said anything publicly about Classic servers for the Riot MMO and we’re not going to invent a quote for them, but the people who lived through that argument are in the building, which is also why we read things like Riot’s MMO boss thanking Sydney and Singapore closely.
The design brief is the other tell. Riot’s stated goal for Classic is champions with “sharper strengths and weaknesses, missiles and dashes are slower, and there are more stuns”. Read that again with an MMO in mind. It’s a public statement about what Riot thinks legible combat looks like when it isn’t chasing a mechanical ceiling.
Summoner’s Journey is worth watching for the same reason. It’s a progression track with no competitive ladder underneath it, which is the exact motivation problem PvE content has to solve, and Riot is now running that experiment inside its biggest game.
Set the two side by side and the honest version looks like this. Almost every cell on the MMO side is blank, because Riot hasn’t said.
| League Classic (shipped) | Runeterra MMO (unannounced) | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Season 3 Summoner’s Rift, rebuilt | Runeterra, the one confirmed fact |
| Where it runs | Inside the existing League client | Not revealed |
| Roster | 60 champions on pre-rework kits | Not revealed |
| Progression | Summoner’s Journey, Salt through Wood to Legend | Not revealed |
| Ranked | No ladder at launch | Not revealed |
| Combat brief | Slower missiles and dashes, more stuns | Not revealed |
| Old version kept online | Yes, beside the live game | Not revealed |
The world the MMO would have to keep
One fact about the Riot MMO is confirmed: it’s set in Runeterra. Scope, era, platform, business model, which regions you would ever set foot in, how much of the map is playable at all: unrevealed. Anyone handing you a number there is guessing.
What isn’t in doubt is how much world already exists. Riot’s Season 2022 cinematic, “The Call”, is four minutes of it.
It opens at Ornn’s Forge with molten metal coming out of the crucible, then cuts to Sejuani riding Bristle through a storm in the Freljord.
From there it drops Taliyah and Kai’Sa into a ruined village in Shurima while Void horrors come up out of the sand.
It gives Pantheon and Leona a golden arena, then throws Volibear into a blizzard. It ends with Aatrox waking up in firelight.
Every one of those places has years of canon under it and an entry in our Atlas of Runeterra. It’s also why we keep returning to the old-school MMO being built in public one hand-placed zone at a time and to the job posting that described a massive, player-driven world: hand-authored places are what players ask you to keep.
The map above and those crests are the fiction, not a starting zone. We show them because Runeterra is the one confirmed thing about the game. Which corner of it you would spawn in, how large the playable slice is, what era it sits in: Riot hasn’t said, and we’re not filling that in for them.
Your Take
If Riot's Runeterra MMO ever changes past the version you fell in love with, would you want a Classic server for it?
What to Watch
Three open questions from the launch, none of them dated by Riot, plus our earlier coverage of the same argument.
None of these carry a date from Riot, so we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Whether a ranked ladder ever gets attached to Classic. How long Riot keeps two balance surfaces alive once the launch spike settles. And whether anyone on the MMO team says the word Classic out loud about their own game.
Reported from League of Legends (Riot Games) and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
