Latest news from League of Legends, TFT, Wild Rift, and all Riot Games.
Riot has revealed no progression, raid or loot systems for its MMO, so nothing here says what the Riot MMO will do. What it does show is that one of the genre's biggest live games is publicly…
When Marc Merrill, Riot's co-founder, announced the March 2024 reset, he said the initial vision 'just wasn't different enough from what you can play today'. What you can play today is about to…
Kalista guarded her king until he ordered a slaughter at Helia. Hecarim speared her for refusing, and now she answers the betrayed.
WoW Forever is the strongest current evidence of what MMO players want: a living, evolving take on a classic world rather than another expansion treadmill. Riot reset its MMO in March 2024 because,…
Patch cadence is one of the first live-service decisions any new MMO has to make: too fast and players burn out or fall behind, too slow and they leave. Blizzard is now running two answers side by…
Riot has never put a business model for its MMO on the record. The only monetization lines are Greg Street's from 2022 ('players spend money because they want to not because they feel like they have…
Wild Rift x K/DA HEATBRINGER, an official Wild Rift skin trailer.
Spoken and Lore Forever give WoW Forever AI-voiced quests and lore. The Riot MMO could do the same for side NPCs while champions keep actors.
Riot has never put a business model on the record for its Runeterra MMO; every Riot game so far is free-to-play and sells cosmetics, and the only monetization comments (Greg Street, 2022) predate…
Every MMO with a player economy and tradeable gold grows a carry market, and real-money gold launders through it; Blizzard is now policing the payment path itself rather than only the seller. Riot…
K/DA - NEVER GOING BACK ft. MIYEON and SOYEON of i-dle (Official Visualizer), an official League of Legends music video.
Riot has said nothing about how its Runeterra MMO will split players: servers, shards, a single world, or rulesets. Forever is the newest live test of the ruleset model, a realmless structure where…
Diana’s biography already maps a run through the Solari Temple on Mount Targon: its guardians, its high priests and its dead. A lore read for the Riot MMO.
Ten League champions ranked by the power their own canon gives them, from Bel'Veth to Aurelion Sol, with Zilean as an honorable mention.
WoW Forever puts every player of a ruleset on one realm, and this week shows the price: each extra ruleset splits that one population, and Blizzard reversed itself within a week under player…
Two of the Riot MMO's senior hires spent years inside World of Warcraft: principal game designer Brian Holinka (about 11 years at Blizzard on WoW PvP and combat) and senior game producer Raymond Bartos (a…
The Shadow Isles Rise in League Classic, an official League of Legends video with Mordekaiser, Hecarim, Lucian and Yorick.
True Damage Akali & Ekko, Inkshadow Braum, Ekko & Yasuo, an official 2XKO music video with Caitlyn, Akali, Braum, Yasuo, Ekko and Vi.
Primal Ambush Warwick, Vi & Akali // PROJECT: Ekko, Jinx & Yasuo, an official 2XKO skin trailer with Caitlyn, Warwick, Darius, Akali, Teemo, Yasuo, Ekko, Jinx and Vi.
Dunkmaster Darius, Pool Party Vi, Cosmic Yasuo, Illaoi & Blitzcrank, an official 2XKO skin trailer with Blitzcrank, Caitlyn, Darius, Illaoi, Akali, Teemo, Yasuo, Jinx and Vi.
SWTOR is the clearest record of what happens when a story-RPG studio builds an MMO: a fully voiced, class-story online game that outlived the studio that made it. Its lead writer says the MMO paid…
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,…
K/DA - WATCH ME ft. Sophie Powers, Mimi Webb (Official Lyric Video), an official League of Legends music video.
Sett Champion Spotlight, an official 2XKO cinematic with Sett.
The person who decides what the Riot MMO becomes came up at BioWare, and on the day it died he named what he valued there: worlds, companions and choices that matter. Those are RPG story values, not…
When Marc Merrill reset the Riot MMO in March 2024, his reason was that 'the initial vision just wasn't different enough from what you can play today.' WoW: Forever is Blizzard's own answer to that…
K/DA – FIRESTARTER – Official Choreography Video, an official League of Legends music video with Evelynn, Akali and Ahri.
ArcheAge Chronicles is a big-budget action-combat MMO letting the public into open-world PvP before its trading and housing systems are ready, so the combat has to carry the first impression on its…
Albion Online is one of the few live MMOs built around open-world territory PvP and a player-made economy, and its seasons have long rewarded organised guilds over everyone else. Opening season…
New World is the clearest recent case of a big company's MMO ending, and the Riot MMO has a direct link to it. When Amazon's cuts hit its game teams in October 2025, Marc Merrill, Riot's co-founder…
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.
Riot has never named the MMO's engine, but its own MMO job listings ask for Unreal: a 'Staff Software Engineer, Unreal Tools - MMO' role to build 'custom Unreal tooling', and an April 2026 call from…
Stellacorns fall to Mount Targon as young stars. Keepers borrow their healing and send them back, and nobody in canon hunts one.
Launch-day server load is where big MMOs most often fail in public, and Blizzard is running a full open stress test of WoW: Forever two weeks out, open even to players who don't pay. Riot has never…
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…
Wild Rift x K/DA HEATBRINGER ft. MIYEON and SOYEON of i-dle, Sophie Powers, Mimi Webb, an official Wild Rift music video with Karma.
K/DA - FIRESTARTER ft. MIYEON and SOYEON of i-dle, Sophie Powers, Mimi Webb (Official Music Video), an official League of Legends music video with Karma.
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…
Race bonuses are one of the oldest arguments in MMO design: either a race's passive is part of its identity, or it quietly tells min-maxers which race to roll. Blizzard has just picked a side for…
Every big MMO has to split a crowd across servers somehow, and the method decides whether players keep running into the same people. Blizzard chose a single mega-server cut into layers for WoW…
Condominas runs the Riot MMO, a game set in Runeterra, the world that League's lore builds. A leading lore creator publicly wondered whether Riot is holding new canon back for the MMO, and the…
Nine League champions ranked by what their canon says they endured, from Aphelios at #9 to Renekton at #1, each told from their own biography.
League Classic was Riot's first live test of the question every MMO studio has faced since WoW Classic: will players stay in an old version of a game, or just visit it? Riot's own answer is that…
Samira Champion Spotlight, an official 2XKO cinematic with Samira.
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…
2XKO is Riot's most recent attempt to take the League of Legends world into a new genre, and it is closing because it could not reach the player numbers its cost demanded. The MMO is Riot's next and…
This is the biggest Western MMO launch of 2026, and it shows two things the Riot MMO will face. Hundreds of thousands of players still show up on day one for a new fantasy MMO, and the same players…
The Zaun Gray is thickest at the bottom of the undercity, so Zaun’s elevators, hitched rides and street climbs are all ways up out of the smog.
Samira and Sett Gameplay Reveal Trailer, an official 2XKO cinematic with Samira and Sett.
WoW: Forever is being tuned in public two weeks into its beta, and the first big lever Blizzard pulled was leveling speed: testers were reaching the cap too fast through dungeon quests, so the bonus…
Ornn's smiths, the Hearthblood, died when he fought his brother Volibear on their mountain. Read as a questline, it starts with a smith relearning their craft from old tales and ends at Ornn's anvil.
True Damage: Know My Name, an official League of Legends skin trailer with Qiyana, Akali, Senna, Yasuo and Ekko.
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…
Riot's MMO will be the first Riot game where you share a world with strangers instead of a lobby the matchmaker filled for you, so it has to decide how grouping with strangers feels. Blizzard's…
Riot has not said whether players in its Runeterra MMO will trade gold or items, and none of its current games has a player-run currency economy to police. WoW: Forever shows the cost of free…
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 co-founder Marc Merrill on Lemonade Stand: why Riot waited to build its MMO, who it is for, and how free to play and Tencent shape it.
Riot’s canon makes Mount Targon’s summit unmappable: the path shifts under every climber, and the climb lasts as long as the mountain’s judgment of them takes.
Riot has never put a business model for its Runeterra MMO on the record, and its current catalog is free-to-play monetized through cosmetics. ArcheAge S is a studio saying on camera how an MMO…
2 new Riot job listings name Unreal Engine, massively multiplayer scale, and a live server fleet. The Runeterra MMO is being built, and here is the read.
Know My Name ft. True Damage (Official Music Video), an official League of Legends music video.
On the Shadow Isles, light drives back the Black Mist, yet the looters at the Whale’s Tooth say the things outside ignore their torches. A Demacian historian’s notes, spread across Legends of Runeterra cards, explain why: the demon Nocturne comes for fear, and the only safe way out is to pay for passage.
The naming crisis comes straight from WoW Forever's realmless design, and Riot's MMO faces the same choice. One shared world means one global pool of names, and whatever scheme Riot picks needs a…
Azir raised Shurima’s capital from the desert, but the people it was built for burned in its fall, his only heir fled it, and its streets hold a sand army. Riot’s canon already stages the dungeon: the trapped catacombs, the cursed tomb door and the dais where sand replays Xerath’s betrayal.
This is a classic-style MMO being tuned in public, week by week, by a team full of the people Riot has been hiring from: Riot's MMO counts ex-WoW combat designer Brian Holinka, ex-WoW lead producer…
League Classic is Riot's live test of the exact question the Riot MMO faces: how much of the old game to keep, and who decides. Riot is answering it with published, binding player votes, and the…
An MMO is a game where you constantly meet strangers, so how Riot lets people talk to each other is a core decision for its Runeterra MMO, not a side feature. Team Voice is Riot's first attempt at…
Riot's MMO will be the first online world for millions of League players who have never had to compete with a stranger for a kill. Blizzard is betting that a little friction, like fighting over a…
Riot has never said what a player picks at character creation in its MMO, and Runeterra does not divide neatly into WoW-style races: its peoples are split by region (Freljord, Ionia, Noxus, Shurima)…
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…
The executive who announced the Riot MMO's 2024 reset and calls it 'the grail' is personally playing Blizzard's WoW Forever beta. He is also farming the kind of hidden, dungeon-gated reward that…
Aion 2 is the biggest new MMO launch of 2026, and it just rehearsed at full scale, in public, two weeks before release. For a Riot team that reset its MMO to be 'different enough' and has never…
Cancellation is the live fear around Riot's MMO: Riot announced on August 20, 2026 that active development of its fighting game 2XKO ends in December, r/RiotMMO has since asked 'Will it even come…
HEARTSTEEL Live My Life, an official League of Legends skin trailer with Aphelios, Ezreal, Kayn, Sett and Yone.
Every MMO has to decide whether its easiest classes are a stepping stone or a real endgame choice, and Riot's MMO has never said which way it leans. This post is Riot's live-game design lead…
Salvatore is the engineer Riot hired away from WoW Classic to build the League MMO's engineering team, and this week his old shop's classic-shaped relaunch produced demand its own developers call…
Vanguard is the anti-cheat layer every Riot PC game ships with, and this post shows it doing the thing an MMO needs more than a shooter does: policing who owns an account, who is actually playing it…
This is a direct staffing signal on the Riot MMO's own studio, and its craft is the tell: every other open Riot Discovery Studio role in Sydney is engineering (five) or art (one), and this is the…
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.
HEARTSTEEL - Live My Life ft. Anderson .Paak, BAEKHYUN, Connor Price, Nic D (Official Music Video), an official League of Legends music video with Aphelios, Ezreal, Kayn, Sett and Yone.
Bilgewater’s only law is a bounty board of names with prices. Pyke’s canon gives him a crew manifest no record can trace, and it refills when it runs out.
Blizzard will not allow GDKP in WoW Forever, and says it has been too lenient on gold buyers. What Riot’s MMO should settle before it launches.
The Riot MMO team says almost nothing in public by policy, so the only signals fans get are posts like this one, and the two producers who joined from Blizzard are now the most visible people on the…
Blizzard keeps WoW Forever's flight paths long and makes campfire buffs wait a minute, on purpose. Its lead engineer says why. What Riot's MMO should copy.
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.
WoW Forever freezes the cap at 60, adds no catch-up and shares Legacy points across alts. Why horizontal progression is the habit Riot's MMO has to keep.
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.
Riot has never shown the MMO, so the community measures it against whatever the genre ships, and this week the genre shipped the thing Riot said it would not make. Merrill's own reset note said the…
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.
Preach Gaming names seven things retail WoW got wrong: the skill gap, the anxiety tax, a broken tutorial, dead content, one currency, level inflation and moving rules.
Ionia’s Garden of Forgetting takes the memory attached to your pain and never gives it back. Riot has written the whole exchange: the gardeners who pay nightly, the fawn grown from the tree at its centre, and the one visitor who stopped the sale halfway through. A grounded read of the canon and what it hands an MMO.
Marc Merrill talked for 57:55 at PAX West and gave the Riot MMO a nickname instead of a date. Riot cut 39 seconds of it to 7 million views. Here is the full exchange the clip leaves out, the paid-game line that is being misread, and how the two public threads are splitting on it.
Riot wrote the crowd in Sett’s arena as Ionians who found the appetite only after the war. A read of the economy under Navori.
Riot has never had to solve the problem an MMO hands you on day one: strangers who have to talk to each other in a shared space, forever, without the studio being able to mute the whole thing. Team…
Riot’s Trials of Twilight reveals Ionia’s best-loved fable as a Kinkou cover story, and turns one guard’s centuries at a sealed door into a questline.
Phroxzon runs Champions, Balance, Preseason and Modes for League, not the MMO, but he just put a studio-level design position on the record: friction is load-bearing, and the fix for a meta players ha
Riot's MMO has to answer one question before it answers any other: is Runeterra a place you cross, or a menu you queue from. Rare has now run that experiment on a live shared world and published the r
Riot has drawn the city above Mount Targon, named its residents and given them a language, but no story in the canon has a Runeterran make that climb and come back down from it. The Aspects cannot cross down without borrowing a body, the ascent has no route anyone can map, and the climbers who fail are absorbed into the same rock patterns some Rakkor read as a map of the realms beyond. A grounded lore read of the crossing Riot has already fully specified, and what it leaves the Riot MMO to build. Nothing here is announced.
This is the clearest public picture of the Riot MMO's shape since the 2024 reset, and it comes from Riot's own hiring paperwork rather than a trailer. The studio has a name, a five-office footprint…
Lux Champion Spotlight, an official 2XKO cinematic with Lux.
'Expanding Runeterra' is a plain description of the MMO's actual job. TFT and Riftbound each add a slice of the world with every set, and the MMO has to eventually hand players one walkable map that…
Lux Gameplay Reveal Trailer, an official 2XKO cinematic with Lux.
Riot says a Bandle City door opens only for someone who can read it. Every resident Legends of Runeterra printed behind one arrived by botching a job.
League of Legends sorts its players into a nine-rank ladder from Iron to Challenger, and Riot's unannounced MMO has to put every one of those people into the same shared Runeterra, which is the proble
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
The Freljord’s biggest bridge network runs down a chasm, and its own keepers sealed nearly every way onto it. One roped descent a year is what is left.
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
Group finding is a make-or-break social architecture decision for the Riot MMO, and the studio has stacked its team with people who lived the WoW version of this exact argument: Brian Holinka (11 year
Riot’s canon gives the Medarda clan soft power and its matriarch a war office. Reading Ambessa’s story beats as quest design, and following who pays.
Orlando Salvatore runs engineering on Riot's League MMO, and the thing he chose to talk about publicly this week is the single unsolved problem his project is heading toward: how many people show up o
Riot has never put a business model on the record for its Runeterra MMO, so the only honest baseline is its track record: a catalog that is entirely free-to-play, monetized through cosmetics. That mak
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
A Riot job listing reported in October 2025 described the unannounced MMO as a persistent sandbox world where thousands of players interact seamlessly, and Riot has never explained how that sandbox is
Heart of the Forest I Enchanted Wilds Set Cinematic, an official Teamfight Tactics cinematic.
EverQuest wrote the social contract every MMO since has inherited: you needed other people to accomplish anything, dying cost you your corpse and your experience, and the world made you dependent on s
The loudest complaint about the modern MMO is that external data solves the game before you get to play it: parse sites, gear-score checks at the door, damage meters that turn a raid night into a perf
The tree at the heart of Bandle City predates the yordles and owns its portals. Riot already built a whole town for the travelers who never got home.
Riot has staffed its Runeterra MMO almost entirely out of the theme-park lineage: Brian Holinka on combat, Raymond Bartos in production, Orlando Salvatore in engineering, all from World of Warcraft. K
One Legends of Runeterra set turns a Demacian monster hunt into a working contract system: four hunters, written weak points, cheap breakable gear. The quarry is a cursed woman whose brother is in the party.
Riot's MMO has to answer from scratch three questions Pearl Abyss just answered in public: how many playable classes one world can carry before they blur into each other, whether character progression
Riot has never shown a frame of MMO gameplay, so its own job listings are close to the only public documents describing how the game is meant to play, and this one is about the single thing a player f
Riot has never said whether its MMO will run named persistent servers or a single sharded megaworld, and Celebras is the clearest recent evidence of what that choice costs. The server only became wort
Enchanted Wilds, an official Teamfight Tactics trailer.
5 new Riot job listings name Unreal Engine, massively multiplayer scale, and a live server fleet. The Runeterra MMO is being built, and here is the read.
Entrusted by the dying Orlon with the Hammer of Demacia, the yordle Poppy spends centuries searching for a hero worthy of wielding it, unaware that she is the protector Demacia already needs.
A Noxian general captured Ionia’s most sacred site and held its people to lure in a relief column. Canon records who broke out, and who paid for it afterwards.
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
Ionia's coast is stocked with residents, not prey: a village-bearing behemoth, kept river otters, and a glade that asks strangers where they are from.
FFXIV is the biggest traditional hotbar MMO on the market, and it has just conceded that its combat asks for too many buttons, then discovered it could not simply fix that: thirteen years of muscle me
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
Riot already drew Shurima's whole traversal ladder: skallashi, sandboards, sandswimmer hitchhiking, and rope-strung villages riding giant beasts. All of it stops at one sealed door.
Targon’s valleys shear and milk their animals on a schedule. Above the snowline, the only job on record is catching fallen stellacorns and putting them back.
Ten darkin weapons lie buried across Runeterra, one in a Demacian manor where it cries at night. The cards map a monster hunt the Riot MMO could inherit.
The grief that drowned the Shadow Isles is the same love that sewed Gwen, the one living thing in it. A grounded read of Runeterra canon.
What you actually get to BE in Runeterra is the single biggest unanswered question about Riot's MMO, and ArenaNet just answered its own version of it in public with the production math attached. Runet
Riot has never said where it stands on AI-written NPC dialogue in its MMO, and the only public evidence either way is Riot's own recruiting copy: the Sydney listing for a Staff Software Engineer, Engi
Noxus keeps one of its three ruling seats out of the public record. Mel Medarda came home with new magic and an old name, and the empire still will not let her in.
Hextech needs no arcane bloodline, only crystals. One Piltovan clan owns the supply, and Legends of Runeterra records what its patronage costs the bench.
Riot's entire live-game catalogue is free-to-play monetised through cosmetics, and several of its best-selling skin lines (K/DA, Pentakill, Star Guardian, High Noon) are explicitly alternate universes
Freljord canon puts every travel route on a seasonal clock. Its one permanent fortress is hidden, and Lissandra recruits by walking into people’s dreams.
Riot has never put a business model on the record for its MMO, and Aion 2 is the biggest Western-facing MMO launch of 2026 laying out the entire modern stack in public: free-to-play base, optional sub
When Riot reset its Runeterra MMO in March 2024, Marc Merrill said the vision "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today." EverQuest Legends is the exact opposite bet: take the formula
League Classic is being built inside Riot R&D, the same organisation the unannounced MMO sits in under the 'Unpublished R&D Product' label its job listings carry, and the person who walked the pricing
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.
6 new Riot job listings name Unreal Engine, massively multiplayer scale, and a live server fleet. The Runeterra MMO is being built, and here is the read.
Riot has just committed to running a second, deliberately older version of its own flagship next to the live one, which is the exact live-ops shape a long-running MMO eventually needs. That question i
Riot just ran in public, at League's scale, the exact experiment its unannounced Runeterra MMO depends on: hand players the older, slower, higher-friction version of a world they say they miss, then w
Riot's Runeterra MMO has been deliberately dark since Marc Merrill announced the reset in March 2024, so everything anyone has actually learned about it since arrived through forensics rather than ann
Book of Travels was the exact bet Riot says it wants to place. It refused the WoW template on purpose and sold itself on atmosphere, slowness and accidental meetings, which is the same argument Marc M
Riot has never put a reward philosophy on the record for its unannounced Runeterra MMO, but this is the clearest thing it has shipped in years: a cosmetic that cannot be bought at any price, granted o
Riot has never put a business model on the record for its Runeterra MMO. There is no announced price, no subscription answer, no cosmetics policy, and the only Riot statements anyone can cite on MMO m
This is the person who manages engineering on the Riot MMO describing, in his own words, what the team is doing right now: building engine technology from the ground up, in August 2026, roughly two an
This is the Riot MMO itself, described in Riot's own recruiting copy rather than by a leaker. It tells us the project is no longer a single Los Angeles room: there is a second hub on the other side of
Feed the Hunger, an official Wild Rift cinematic.
Noxus Prime’s nightlife is canon: enclave songs, arena crowds, street hawkers. So is the fortress at its center that pulls the city’s dead into a well.
Riot has never put a business model on the record for its Runeterra MMO, and this is the first listing we can point to where the company is staffing the commerce layer for the unannounced R&D product:
Welcome Back, Summoners, an official League of Legends cinematic.
The Mageseeker A League of Legends all Voiced Cutscenes, an official Riot Forge video.
Riot's MMO is being built in large part by the people who ran this exact machine: Brian Holinka joined in June 2026 after roughly 11 years on WoW PvP and combat design, Raymond Bartos was a Lead Produ
In Demacia power is a thing you carry, so the state punishes people by taking their gear. Its own stone quietly stores the magic it soaks up.
Everything that went wrong for SpiritVale is a launch-day infrastructure problem, not a content problem: the world, the classes and the loot were finished, and what failed was the backend holding thou
Marc Merrill's March 2024 note resetting the Riot MMO said the initial vision 'just wasn't different enough from what you can play today.' Koster's documentary is a 22-minute diagnosis of exactly that
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
Canon routes all trade between Runeterra’s continents through Piltover’s Sun Gate, and Renata Glasc plans to take it. A read on the MMO’s natural crossroads.
Erenshor is the clearest working answer yet to the problem that will decide whether Riot's MMO feels alive on a Tuesday morning in a low-population region: an MMO's best content is gated behind other
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
ESO is the closest living analogue to what a Runeterra MMO has to become: a big-budget western themepark MMO carrying a beloved single-player fiction, kept alive for over a decade on a content treadmi
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.
Riot's careers board now tags four live roles to its unnamed MMO, and one listing drops the pretense: 'A highly anticipated Riot MMO.' Three of the four sit in Sydney, the studio Riot built from the BigWorld server team, hiring for build tooling across a distributed network of servers, an on-call rotation, and a pipeline made for parallel production streams. The full read, role by role.
Demacia raised petricite walls to keep magic out, and built the perfect farm for a demon that eats fear instead. A grounded read of the paradox at the heart of Riot's most magic-proof kingdom, and what the MMO would inherit.
A Bilgewater card shows Evelynn binding a broken demon instead of killing it, and the canon around it already sketches a demon-binding class. Nothing announced.
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
Aurora’s canon reads like a companion quest: a witch who sees spirits escorts a lost demigod to the far north of the Freljord. Grounded speculation, nothing announced.
World of Warcraft spent a decade tearing down the Alliance-Horde wall it could never balance. Runeterra can do factions right, if it builds a banner instead of a wall. Our design: three creeds.
The Activision merger did not change who owned Blizzard. It changed what Blizzard had to answer to. A look at how revenue targets reshaped World of Warcraft, and the one thing Riot has to protect in its own MMO.
Shurima is drawn as a desert too big to cross on foot. A traversal read of its beast-mounts, its sand, and the floating Sun Disc a rider steers by. Nothing announced.
EverQuest Legends halved core inventory between betas and sells the difference back in its cash shop. The backlash is a live lesson for a Riot MMO with a cosmetics-only track record.
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
Nilah’s card says Bilgewater. Her canon home is Kathkan, a kingdom beside fallen Camavor that Riot never drew, and it hints at which zones an MMO builds first.
Riot rebooted its Runeterra MMO in 2024 because the first attempt looked too much like the MMOs players already had, which makes 'how much old-school depth do modern players actually want back' the qu
Demacia's canon runs paid hunts, slayer festivals, and tame raptors. The apex monster exists in one card, and its only record is a goodbye letter.
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
Nasus keeps failed god-warriors in hanging sarcophagi, and one Legends of Runeterra card shows why. We design the Unrenewed, a baccai raid built on real Shurima canon. Grounded speculation, nothing an
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
This is Runeterra world-building the MMO will draw on, personally endorsed by the MMO's own executive sponsor. Riftbound is Riot's most active vehicle for canonizing and deepening Runeterra's regional
A monster in K'Sante's past heals from every nonlethal blow, and his canon spells out the hunt to kill it. A questline read of Shurima. Grounded speculation.
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is building the hand-crafted, group-first MMO Riot studied and reset away from. How it stacks up against EverQuest and WoW Classic. Analysis.
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
Bandle City sits off the map, yet Riot’s canon already threads hidden portal woods out to every region, and only yordles can find them. A grounded MMO read.
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
This is the Riot MMO's leadership speaking on the record about the project as a group, which almost never happens since the team went dark after the March 2024 reset. Condominas used a brutal industry
A cursed Freljord spear and its costly upgrade sketch a whole crafting profession: bind the weapon, trade humanity for power. Grounded speculation.
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
Camavor caused the Ruination and has never appeared on Runeterra’s map. Smolder’s bio ends with a promise to return. Where the Riot MMO’s first ocean voyage could land. Grounded speculation.
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
Milio’s soothing fire is a finished MMO healer fantasy, but our zone predictions say Ixtal sits out launch. We read the axiomata, the Vidalion, and the Yun Tal for the expansion his canon actually sets up.
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
Canon already painted the launch map's hub furniture: Piltover's Ecliptic Vaults, Bilgewater's bounty board, Nashramae's markets. We map the five cities that should anchor the Riot MMO's launch and pick the one everyone will AFK in.
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
Zaahen, The Unsundered: we read their kit, canon, and home region for what they hint about the Riot MMO. Grounded speculation, nothing announced.
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
Naafiri is not a class, she's a raid boss. We design The Gathering Pack, a Darkin-expansion raid built on her real canon and Shurima lore, quoted and sourced. Grounded speculation, nothing announced.
You cannot kill a demon, so you bind it. We design The Garden of Agony, a petricite demon hunt against Evelynn led by Locke, grounded in real canon and quoted throughout. Speculation, nothing announce
Hwei, the Visionary: we read their kit, canon, and home region for what they hint about the Riot MMO. Grounded speculation, nothing announced.
Riot confirmed League Classic and WoW Classic still thrives. Players keep choosing old-school design. Here is what that trend should teach the unannounced Riot MMO about friction, danger, and a world
EverQuest, the game that invented forced grouping, just relaunched fully soloable. What EverQuest Legends’ respect-your-time rebuild signals for Riot’s Runeterra MMO.
Two new Riot job listings name Unreal Engine, creature pipelines for massive multiplayer, and a distributed server fleet with a live on-call rotation. The Runeterra MMO is being built, and here is the
MMO executive producer Fabrice Condominas thanked two Riot studios. For a project gone dark, it's a real signal about who's building the Runeterra MMO.
Lux and Samira: New Champion Reveals - Evo 2026 — featuring Lux and Samira from 2XKO.
Locke, the Ashen Exorcist from League of Legends.
Pandemonium: What We Face, an official League of Legends video with Vayne.
Locke: The Ashen Exorcist from League of Legends.
A nail-slinging exorcist versed in forbidden rites, Corvin Locke is the progeny of Demacian occultists. Born into lies and hypocrisy, he learned young that demons aren’t the cause of humanity’s darkness, but the consequence. Now, Locke tears through every soul, exposing its darkness, intent on making the world a more honest place… one exorcism at a time.
We’ll absolutely be fighting demons in Riot’s MMO — from Evelynn to the eight remaining Demon Kings. Here’s the Demon Hunter class we’d bet on, built from Locke’s kit. Vote at the end.
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.
Locke Champion Spotlight from League of Legends.
Locke's champion cinematic, in which the Demacian demon hunter known as the Ashen Exorcist confronts a Vayne possessed by a demonic entity, banishes the demons, and pulls her back to herself — hinting at a shared past between the two hunters.
Thresh Champion Spotlight — featuring Thresh from 2XKO.
Thresh Gameplay Reveal Trailer — featuring Thresh from 2XKO.
Sarah Tudor — the producer who ran 2XKO's Stages, Avatars and Lobbies through its live-service ramp — has joined Riot's long-awaited Runeterra MMO.
Brian Holinka, World of Warcraft’s former lead combat designer, has joined Riot’s League of Legends MMO — and confirmed he watched an internal playtest. What it means for the roadmap.
Senna Gameplay Reveal Trailer — featuring Senna from 2XKO.
Eternal Aspects Diana & Leona — featuring Diana and Leona from League of Legends.
Pandemonium: What We Fear, an official League of Legends video with Vayne.
Space Gods from Teamfight Tactics.
For Demacia: Winged Protector l Motion Comic – League of Legends — featuring Jarvan IV and Shyvana from League of Legends.
Behold the Space Gods from Teamfight Tactics.
For Demacia: For the Fallen l Motion Comic – League of Legends — featuring Garen from League of Legends.
A League of Legends motion comic staging the state funeral of Xin Zhao, the Seneschal of Demacia, where King Jarvan III delivers the eulogy and Sona performs a sung lamentation, all recounted by the Ionian outsider Yunara of the Kinkou.
For Demacia: Spearhead l Motion Comic – League of Legends — featuring Jarvan IV, Xin Zhao and Yunara from League of Legends.
"Get It" ft. Nina Utashiro — featuring Akali from 2XKO.
Akali Gameplay Reveal Trailer — featuring Akali from 2XKO.
Have a Nice Deity! from Teamfight Tactics.
Nunu & Willump — featuring Nunu and Nunu & Willump from Legends of Runeterra.
2XKO Attract Mode Intro Movie from 2XKO.
A RuneGrove article about 5 new Riot MMO job listings hit 193 upvotes on r/RiotMMO with a 94% positive ratio. The community debates Arcane-style art direction, draws WoW and SWTOR comparisons, and connects the Konariin hire to the game's visual future. Plus: our updated timeline estimate puts the earliest reveal at 2029.
Shyvana Champion Spotlight — featuring Shyvana from League of Legends.
YouTuber Konariin built an Arcane-style fan game that went viral, then got hired by Riot Games. With the Riot MMO in development, fans are speculating whether Konariin's Arcane-inspired visual style could influence the game's direction.
New job postings for Riot's unpublished MMO reveal combat systems, narrative design, rendering tech, and animation priorities, while Blizzard veterans continue joining the team.
Shyvana addresses her brood-mother Yvva in this champion update trailer, rejecting the elder dragon's legacy of destruction and declaring her own path — forged through courage found alongside Jarvan IV and Demacia.
The official 2XKO original soundtrack featuring all 10 lobby themes — a diverse collection of tracks that define the fighting game's arena energy and identity.
Norra, the Portal Mistress, is an esteemed magician and keeper of the most enviable library in Bandle City. She weaves colorful threads of memory into her crafty realm-hopping portals, proving that magic lies in even the most ordinary of trinkets. Ever the curious yordle, she was accidentally transported to a far-flung realm when she explored the Book of Threshold’s mysterious final chapter. Now Norra must summon every ounce of wit within her to find a way home—where her faithful cat, Yuumi, waits patiently, and the kettle is always warm.
Carving Bays — concept art from Culture of Bilgewater
The shifting tides of the desert has been known to carve paths through bare rock, tumbling over the cliff faces in massive sandfalls. Traditionally, Shurimans toss beloved objects into the sands as gifts to the Ascended. As a result, such falls are often lucrative spots for treasure hunters.
Freljordian Home — concept art from Concept Art
Village Market — concept art from Environments of Ionia
Demacia Raptors — concept art from Demacian Raptors
Champion Update: Norra — Norra, the Portal Mistress, is an esteemed magician and keeper of the most enviable library in Bandle City. She debuts in Wild Rift as the first original Rift inductee.
Yordles do not necessarily control their glamour, and may understand it in a variety of ways. The revered inventor Heimerdinger, for example, crafted unique technological devices for himself and Ziggs, to help them blend into Piltovan society.
In less enlightened parts of the world, a yordle’s appearance could seem frightening or unnatural to mortals. Fortunately, they are adept at blending in, and often protected by a kind of supernatural glamour—subconsciously fading from the viewer’s notice, or being masked as a less remarkable individual.
While there are portals whose positions can shift over time, there are many that stay rooted in a single location. The magic of the spirit realm occasionally ebbs back and forth around such places—known as bandlewoods—and affects the local flora and fauna in strange, unpredictable ways.
Certain pathways can only be opened with a series of specific gestures, often defined by peculiar symbols inscribed nearby. This particular portal opens to a deep cavern, when the low tide reveals a pattern of runic circles, filling the indentations with sea water.
Runeterra is linked to an enchanted place in the spirit realm known as Bandle City. The pathways are rarely seen by mortals, for they only open under particular circumstances, or for those with the ability to read and interpret the language of the yordles.
Fascinated by the relationships they observe among the mortals of Runeterra, the gregarious yordles tend to form deep and lasting connections with one another—and for the folk of Bandle City, there is no greater bond than the family you choose for yourself.
Long before the yordles called Bandle City home, there was only a tree. No one knows why, or when, but it grew to fill the space behind reality, unfurling its branches into the Spirit Realm until it had no clear beginning or end—it simply was, and had always been.
Over the centuries, many mortals from the world above have answered the Void’s call, or been dragged down against their will. There are those among them—few and far between—who have survived the encounter... though not a single one of them returned <i>unchanged.</i>
Some legends suggest that, when they first emerge into the Runeterran air, the Voidborn are generally pale, fibrous and flexible. As they age, sections of their form harden into a darker, shell-like chitin, which can become strong enough to turn aside almost any weapon.
Though it has bred many of them, no two horrors of the Void are exactly the same. Their otherworldly forms are as varied as they are terrifying—yet all are driven by an insatiable hunger, with the eerie pulsing of their hearts driving them relentlessly onward.
One of the few known ways to combat the Void is to starve it. With no organic or magical sustenance nearby, the Void’s material growth will slow, until it eventually falls into a dormant state.
On the outskirts of Icathia lies the Rupture—evidence of the Void itself bursting forth from deep beneath the ground, in an age now lost to history. Though the bold and the curious alike have often sought to learn more, only the most foolhardy explorer would ever dare venture into the dark spaces beneath.
A great and terrible battle was fought against the Void before the walls of ancient Icathia. In the aftermath, the lands all around the damned city became deserted wastes, and its very existence was struck from the maps of Shurima. It was hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the horrors unleashed there would eventually be forgotten...
In the abyssal darkness, deep underground, it is believed that the first great Void creatures to walk the surface of Runeterra now lie, dormant and unseen. If that is true, then they have waited patiently through the millennia, and it must surely now be time for them to rise once more.
The current occupants of the high seat of the Yun Tal were blessed with ten daughters—respectfully referred to by many as “the Yunalai”. Having the benefit of generations of inherited mastery, it is little surprise that all of them were ready to face the Vidalion at prodigiously young ages.
The most trusted Yun Tal may be designated as the prefects of outlying villages and settlements beyond Ixaocan, such as Ohmka, Xolen, or Paretha. Their duties include the resolution of local disputes, testing potential aspirants, and generally ensuring that the Ixtali people have as little interaction with outsiders as possible...
For countless generations, Ixtal’s secrets have been preserved by their most gifted and wise elementalists. There are no formal criteria for admission to the Yun Tal, though aspirants can expect to be tested to the very limit of their abilities, and any approval must be unanimous among those present.
Protected by magic and solitude, Ixtal needs no armies. The closest thing they have to professional soldiers are the path wardens of Ixaocan, who endlessly patrol the lines of power between arcologies, and are much respected for it.
Upon acceptance into the ruling Yun Tal caste, an initiate will have their own magic woven around them by the Vidalion, creating shimmering garments that respond to the needs of the wearer. This confirms the status of a true elemental master, who will lead and teach others in turn.
Within the cardinal arcology of Ixaocan is a grand chamber, deliberately positioned at the very center of Ixtal... and indeed the whole of Runeterra, as far as the Ixtali are concerned. Above this chamber hangs the Vidalion, an ancient artifact that can weave magic into material form.
To the people of Ixtal, the world is merely a vast confluence of material forces, which they alone are capable of mastering. Each and every permutation of elemental magic—from the most simple to the most complex—is governed by a numbered Axiom, held almost sacred by the arcology that teaches it.
Curiously, the abandoned ruins scattered throughout Ixtal are home to a surprising number of dragons. These terrifying creatures have not fought alongside mortals since the last days of Shurima’s war against the Void—now, for the most part, they seem content just to be left alone.
The further one travels from the cardinal arcology, the more specialized and prestigious the masteries become. High in the mountains, the mages of this relatively small arcology combine their understandings of fire, rock, and magnetism to draw precious metals from the earth, crafting them into exquisite shapes with the merest gesture.
The arcologies are connected by intersecting lines of power, and each represents a specific form or discipline of elemental magic. The largest are home to tens of thousands of Ixtali practitioners, with a social hierarchy based on the length of time spent in study, furthering their progression toward ultimate mastery.
In truth, Ixtal is not the uninhabited wilderness many imagine. Far from prying eyes and greedy hands, the sprawling arcologies of Ixaocan remain safely hidden by the deepest rainforests. The cardinal arcology, seat of the ruling Yun Tal caste, has stood since before the ancient Shurimans raised their first Sun Disc.
Very little is known of Ixtal’s history by those outside its borders. Indeed, over the years, countless expeditions—from Noxus, Bilgewater, and more recently the Piltover Explorers Guild—have delved into the jungle in search of arcane treasures or new territorial claims... only to vanish without a trace.
Famous for the trilling cry it emits before swooping for a kill, the predatory bolor moves in long, gliding leaps along thermal currents with aerodynamic feathered limbs, and loves to prey on stray tamu.
Flocks of tamu are raised by the Rakkor. Their lush coats are sheared twice yearly, and woven into warm clothing and other textiles.
Ibik are rare, solitary herbivores from the lower plains of Targon, where their sweet, fatty milk is considered a delicacy. During its annual hibernation, an ibik’s rough, slate-colored skin can help disguise it amongst the boulders, and they often end up completely covered by the winter snowfall.
The various species native to Targon are uniquely primed to survive under the coldest weather conditions, with thick layers of fat and wooly furs to insulate from bitter winds and snow. Cloven hooves provide support on steep slopes and narrow footholds, while hooked claws easily latch onto ice.
Conversely, Lunari weapons tend to be elegant and easily concealed, sometimes crafted from iridescent moonstone.
Solari weaponsmiths craft ornate gilded blades to reflect the divine light of the sun, and these are almost always carried prominently and visibly outside a holy warrior’s armor.
Solari priests keep an even more watchful eye on the heavens, using astrolabes to predict future events by measuring the movement of specific celestial bodies.
Astronomers and astromancers across Targon meticulously track the sun, moon, and stars, hoping to reveal the will of the Aspects and hasten their coming to this world.
Holding fragrant incense and the extracts of certain rare herbs and plants, these stone-carved offering bowls are used frequently in religious rites.
Even young children of the Rakkor are trained to use hooks and picks, which are essential for survival in the mountains.
During their migrations, the tribes of Targon try to carry as few material objects as possible. Tethered pulley systems are used to transport essential belongings up and down the steep slopes, while heavier tools and equipment are stored in shelters around the mountain, and repaired or remade as needed.
Though it will do nothing to bring back the countless Lunari slain by Solari over the years, it seems the balance of power in Targon may be shifting, as rumors abound that the Aspect of the Moon has taken mortal form once more...
Branded by the Solari as heretics, the Lunari worship the silvery light of the moon. They practice their beliefs in secret, hiding from those who seek to rid Targon of their influence forever—even though some claim that, long ago, the two groups lived in peace, worshipping the heavens as one people.
In the sacred Sunward Temple, the worthiest warriors among the Rakkor seek a place in the Ra’Horak, the elite militant order of the Solari priesthood. This particular shrine was constructed to align with major recurring celestial events, each one framed perfectly by a carefully placed aperture.
The entrance to this Solari temple on the eastern slopes of Mount Targon is carved from gold-veined marble. During times of strife, a priest or scribe might meditate in an outer sanctum for weeks without food or water, subsisting merely on the divine sustenance provided to them by the sun.
While nearly all Rakkor worship the sun, those who completely devote their lives to it are known as the Solari. As the dominant religious sect on Mount Targon, they believe the sun is the source of all life—all other light sources are false, and a threat to the future of their people. Disciples are guided in the strictures of their faith by temple priests, who preach that if the sun was ever to fade, the world would be swallowed by darkness. Accordingly, the Solari stand ready to fight any who would extinguish its holy light.
The Rakkor do not seek war with others, but nonetheless maintain highly skilled militias among all the tribes and outlying settlements. It is said to be almost impossible to surprise a Rakkor force in battle on their own lands.
The Rakkor have endured the trials of their mountainous homeland for millennia, and often make such a life look relatively easy. In truth, they are always vigilant against danger, from above or below.
A name thought to mean “the Tribe of the Last Sun”, the Rakkor tribes boast many skilled artisans, craftspeople, and merchants—however, they tend to value a simple life of humility and prayer to the heavens.