News about Riot Games as a company: studios, leadership, money and the business calls around the MMO. When a report is unconfirmed, the article says so.
WoW Forever is the launch every Runeterra MMO debate will be measured against this winter, and its raid plan is a concrete design bet: three raid sizes (10, 20, 40) side by side, weekly lockouts,…
A Red Dead 2 mod shows what a living world feels like. Here's how AI tools could help Riot's growing MMO team build Runeterra, without replacing anyone.
Reignited was an attempt to answer the question every long-running MMO faces: how do you give newcomers a shared fresh start without walling them off from the players already there? Jagex's answer…
The Riot MMO is being built around a player economy: a Riot listing for a Principal Game Designer, Progression and Economy on the MMO asked for someone to 'build and maintain a thriving MMO player…
The Riot MMO's principal game designer, Brian Holinka, was World of Warcraft's lead PvP designer from 2012 and later its lead combat designer, so Blizzard's rework is a public look at the PvP…
RS4 is the nearest current parallel to the Riot MMO: a studio with a single famous IP, a long live-service history and an unreleased Unreal Engine MMO, which Riot's own MMO job listings confirm as…
RS4 is the closest structural twin to Riot's MMO that the genre has produced: a studio with a 20-plus-year-old world rebuilding it as a brand-new MMO in Unreal Engine, years from launch, beside live…
Riot has already said which side of this argument it is on, and it is not Armstrong's: the reset statement said players do not want 'an MMO that you've played before with a Runeterra coat of paint,'…
Riot's MMO is years from launch, so any law the EU passes now is the law it launches under. The engagement tools the genre runs on (daily quests, login calendars, rested-XP-style catch-up, 'you…
Blizzard made nine design calls on stage at BlizzCon. Six belong in Riot's MMO and three should stay in Azeroth. The list, with every quote and its clock.
Blizzard ruled out flying mounts in WoW Forever and added ships. Why Riot's MMO should never add flying or fast travel, only faster ways through the world.
Blizzard's campfire buffs take a minute of sitting, and its lead engineer says the flight path stays long on purpose. What Riot's MMO should copy from the wait.
WoW Forever drops the realm list for four rule sets and an infrastructure that keeps showing you the same players. What it means for the Riot MMO's servers.
WoW Forever ships official gamepad support and a first-login mode selector. Riot's MMO is hiring a combat and controls lead who knows twin-stick pads.
How Blizzard builds a zone, from 2D map to fog, and why Forever's new zones are about living in Azeroth. What the Riot MMO can take for Runeterra's unbuilt map.
How WoW's hardcore mode went from a community add-on to a two-week prototype, and what Forever adds. What Riot's MMO should take from a mode built on dying.
WoW Forever makes transmog a toggle, hands dungeon appearances to the whole group and ties silhouettes to level. What Riot's cosmetics-funded MMO should take.
The designer who ran WoW's PvP and combat for roughly eleven years, Brian Holinka, started at Riot on June 1, 2026 as Principal Game Designer on the Riot MMO. Hazzikostas has now publicly described th
Guild Wars 3 and the Riot MMO are the two most anticipated unreleased Western MMOs, and ArenaNet just showed its hand on the hardest design problem a lore-heavy MMO faces: who the player actually is i
Every condition these three describe is the exact set Riot's unannounced Runeterra MMO has to survive, and one of the quotes lands almost word-for-word on Riot's own executive producer. Giacomini's 'C
Every MMO eventually has to answer whether the community may build tools on top of its client, and the two live answers now point in opposite directions. Jagex is absorbing the fan tooling layer into
Riot hired Brian Holinka onto its MMO in June 2026 as Principal Game Designer, and press reporting on that hire was specific about his remit: player combat, world traversal, enemy behaviors, and core
RuneScape just rebuilt twenty years of player housing around one idea: homes five friends raise together. Here is why housing is the retention pillar no MMO walks back, what thirty years of front doors prove, and four blueprints for a Runeterra home, from petricite townhouses to doors into the spirit realm.
Tencent owns Riot Games outright, so this is Riot's parent company walking away from its single biggest MMO bet: a faithful mobile port of one of the two giants every new MMO gets measured against. If
Throne and Liberty is one of the largest live free-to-play MMOs -- the closest existing analog to the F2P model Riot's unannounced MMO will ship into -- and it just made structured, seasonal, matchmad
Stars Reach wiped every character and shipped sliders for horns, tails, and everything else. World of Warcraft spent fifteen years showing where unbounded cosmetics lead: yeti pajamas in a war fantasy you cannot opt out of seeing. Player uniqueness matters, and so does the world. Here is where Runeterra should draw the line.
The contrast with the Riot MMO is the whole point of the story. A veteran online-game studio just handed its unfinished shooter to the entire public for two weeks and is collecting feedback in the ope
Class and combat identity is the single biggest thing we know nothing about for the Riot MMO, and it matters more now that Riot hired World of Warcraft combat and PvP designer Brian Holinka as a princ
Riot rebooted its Runeterra MMO in 2024 specifically because the first version looked too much like existing MMOs, which makes 'what do MMO players actually want that they aren't already getting' the
Riot's own job listings describe the Runeterra MMO as a 'persistent sandbox world,' and Marc Merrill justified the 2024 reboot in exactly these terms: the first version wasn't different enough from th
This is a genre-benchmark design decision that informs the Riot MMO's direction. Lairs are WoW's answer to a problem any modern Runeterra MMO will have to solve: how to deliver big, dramatic boss enco
This informs the Riot MMO's direction on a core question: how much scaffolding a modern MMO needs. Pax Dei sold itself as a pure social sandbox with minimal hand-holding, and it is now bolting on an a
Riot reset its Runeterra MMO in 2024 specifically because the existing version felt too similar to games players already had, and Marc Merrill has framed the goal as a significant evolution of the gen
The Elder Scrolls Online is one of the last big live themepark MMOs, and watching its own publisher cut up to half the team mid-flight is the clearest picture yet of how brutal the live-service MMO mo
Riot invented the modern seasons-plus-battle-pass playbook — free content on a fixed cadence, monetized through passes and cosmetics — and ESO, a twelve-year-old AAA MMORPG that lived on paid expansio
Riot's Runeterra MMO is being staffed with the exact people who lived this failure mode: Brian Holinka, WoW's former lead combat designer, joined in June, and former WoW senior producer Raymond Bartos
Riot's Runeterra MMO is being built inside a company that funds its own games out of League and Valorant revenue and Tencent ownership, answering to no external publisher. Project Fantasy just demonst
Every MMO in development, including Riot's, has to decide how to weight raiding, crafting, social play, and territory, and clean reads on what players actually want are scarce. Scars of Honor just pub
The Riot MMO has revealed nothing about how it will make money, and monetization is the thing Runeterra fans fear most from the company behind League's storefront. Aion 2 is the genre's live referendu
EverQuest, the game that invented forced grouping, just relaunched fully soloable. What EverQuest Legends’ respect-your-time rebuild signals for Riot’s Runeterra MMO.
Guild Wars 3 was announced at Summer Game Fest, a WoW combat lead joined Riot’s MMO and a playtest leaked. Our timeline estimates for all three.
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