Last updated on September 15, 2026
Riot Games co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill gave a rare update on the studio’s long-running League of Legends MMO at PAX West on September 4, sitting down with Greg Miller of Kinda Funny. His message was the same mix of confidence and caution the project has carried for years, five years after Riot first confirmed it was building an MMO set in Runeterra.
What Merrill actually said
Merrill said the team knows what players want from the game and that the real question is whether Riot can deliver it. He described the project as internally nicknamed the Grail, comparing it to the Arthurian legend where many a brave knight are going to die on the Grail quest, but insisting the team pushes forward anyway. No title, no release window, and no public screenshot have been shared alongside the comments.
Five years of stops and restarts
Riot first confirmed the MMO on December 17, 2020, when Greg Street, known online as Ghostcrawler and a former lead systems designer on World of Warcraft, revealed the project as Riot’s VP of IP and entertainment. The team expanded through 2021, and by April 2022 Street was cautioning fans that there was no guarantee the game would ever ship.
Street left Riot in March 2023 after nine years, saying the project was in good hands. A year later, Merrill announced a full reset: the early version felt too close to existing MMOs, and Riot brought in former BioWare producer Fabrice Condominas as executive producer while keeping Vijay Thakkar on as technical director.
The reset arrived alongside company-wide layoffs of more than 500 Riot employees in early 2024, and Merrill warned that news on the MMO would likely go dark for several years. By February 2025, Merrill described the project as the one he personally spends the most time on and said the team had found real momentum.
Where the project stands now
Riot has kept hiring for the MMO through the reset, including former World of Warcraft combat designer Brian Holinka, who joined as principal game designer, and former WoW software engineer Orlando Salvatore. Those hires suggest Riot is still staffing the game as a long-term live service rather than quietly shelving it.
The PAX West comments also landed about two weeks after Riot confirmed it was ending active development on 2XKO, its tag-team fighting game, less than a year after that title launched on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S.
Riot has instead been focusing League of Legends itself on new modes like League Classic, a playlist built around older patches of the MOBA, while the MMO remains the studio’s unfinished long shot.
Why this matters
Five years on, Riot still has no title, no release date, and no gameplay to show for its Runeterra MMO, but Merrill’s comments confirm the project survived its 2024 reset and is still actively staffed.
For a studio built almost entirely around one free-to-play MOBA, a successful MMO would be Riot’s biggest bet yet on expanding beyond League of Legends itself, which is exactly why Merrill keeps reaching for the Holy Grail comparison instead of a release date.
I’m passionate about books and video games. These two great passions represent, for me, a boundless universe where I can “escape” from reality whenever I need or want to. There are so many stories, worlds, and landscapes where I can instantly teleport that I don’t think a whole lifetime would be enough to explore them all (though it would be my greatest dream to be able to).
