The 2024 Riot MMO reset, explained: what was thrown away

"We've decided to reset the direction of the project some time ago."

The tense is the interesting part. When Marc Merrill posted that sentence in March 2024, the reset was already old news inside Riot. The public learned about a decision after it had been made, discussed, and acted on, which tells you how the company intends to communicate about this game: late, briefly, and only when it has to.

Everything written about the Riot MMO divides into before and after that post. This article is about the post itself: what it said, what it did to the team, and which parts of the previous three years of coverage it turned into history.

What Merrill said

The statement came from Merrill, Riot's co-founder and chief product officer, on his own account rather than through a press release. The key passages, as quoted by Game Developer, 80.lv and PCGamesN at the time:

"After a lot of reflection and discussion, we've decided to reset the direction of the project some time ago."

"The initial vision just wasn't different enough from what you can play today."

"We don't want an MMO that you've played before with a Runeterra coat of paint."

And on what would follow: the team would go dark for what was "likely several years", and "this silence will help provide space for the team to focus on the incredible amount of work ahead of them".

Four points, then. The reset predates the announcement. The reason was sameness, not quality or cost. Riot's bar is a "significant evolution of the genre", in Merrill's phrase. And the silence is deliberate, so its length tells you nothing on its own.

What "not different enough" means

Riot has not explained the sentence beyond the sentence, so the honest reading is a narrow one: the game as designed between 2020 and 2023 was recognisably a conventional MMORPG, and Riot judged that a conventional MMORPG with League's characters in it was not worth shipping.

That reading is consistent with the company's history. Riot's other games each took a genre with an established leader and shipped something with a distinct point of view: League against Dota, Valorant against Counter-Strike, Teamfight Tactics in a genre that barely existed. A Riot MMO that plays like the MMO everyone already owns would be the first product to break that pattern. Merrill's post reads as a decision not to break it.

It is also consistent with the pre-reset design as described in public. Greg Street's interviews from 2021 and 2022 sketched a large open world, action combat, dungeons, raids, housing, and a promise to respect the player's time. Those are good intentions. They are also the feature list of every ambitious MMO announced in the last fifteen years. The reset post does not name any of them, and none has been reconfirmed since.

What changed in the team

The reset arrived a year after the project's founder had gone. Street left Riot in March 2023, after nine years, to start his own studio. Vijay Thakkar, the technical director, carried the project in the interim.

With the reset, Fabrice Condominas became Executive Producer. Condominas had been at Riot since 2021, and before that produced Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Star Wars: Squadrons at BioWare and EA. He is a producer of narrative RPGs, not of MMOs, and that is itself a statement about the new direction.

Then the rebuild. Orlando Salvatore, formerly of Blizzard, was reported as the MMO's engineering manager in November 2024, in the same week Merrill said the team "has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum". Thakkar, the technical director, left in December 2024, after eight years at Riot. Raymond Bartos, formerly lead producer on World of Warcraft, joined in January 2026. Brian Holinka, formerly World of Warcraft's lead combat designer, joined on 1 June 2026. We go through each of them in the WoW all-star team.

Mark "Scruffy" Yetter, League's gameplay design director, had moved over as the MMO's game director in 2021. Whether he still holds that role after the reset has never been said. We do not assume either way.

What it invalidated

This is the practical part, because most coverage of the game has not caught up with it.

Every specification below was public before March 2024. Riot has repeated none of them since.

Third-person perspective.

Action combat, no tab-targeting.

A persistent, sandbox-style world.

Free-to-play with cosmetic monetisation and no subscription.

A "very large" open world with named regions.

Dungeons and raids, including talk of Baron Nashor as a boss.

Player housing, transmogrification, fishing.

A design that "respects the player's time" and limits fear of missing out.

Some of these will come back, because some of them are not design choices so much as Riot's business model and Runeterra's geography. But an article that presents this list in the present tense is describing a game Riot decided not to make. We keep the current, confirmed state of the project on one page, everything we actually know, and keep that page separate from the pre-reset list on purpose.

The context around it

The reset was announced two months after the largest layoffs in Riot's history. On 22 January 2024, the company cut 530 jobs, around eleven per cent of its staff, and closed Riot Forge, the label that had published six smaller Runeterra games. CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote that Riot had made "a number of big bets" since 2019 and that "some of those bets aren't paying off".

The MMO was one of those bets. It could have been closed in January with Forge. Instead it was reset in March and rebuilt over the following two years with senior hires from the studio that defines the genre. Over the same period Riot cancelled Hytale, laid off half of the 2XKO team three weeks after that game's launch, and put 2XKO into maintenance mode. The MMO is the exception to all of it, and we think that exception is the most important fact about the project. The argument is in why the MMO survived Riot's purge.

What the reset did to the release date

A restart of the design is a restart of the clock. Merrill's "several years" of silence was the first honest signal of that, and his later "before 2030" is the second. How those two statements combine into a range, and why the "2028" you see elsewhere is not from Riot, is in why "before 2030", and not sooner.

What we do not know

When the reset happened. "Some time ago" could mean weeks or most of a year. The difference matters for the date.

What was kept. Engine and world, presumably. Whether any playable systems or content survived, Riot has not said.

Who replaced Street as the design authority. A game director or creative director has not been named in public since the reset.

Whether the pre-reset promise to respect the player's time was one of the things reset, or one of the things the reset was meant to protect. The 2021 interviews framed it as the project's reason to exist. The 2024 post does not mention it.