Riot MMO: the Grail, and the question Merrill dodged

At 17:01 UTC on 5 September 2026, Riot Games' main account posted thirty-nine seconds of Marc Merrill speaking at PAX West the previous day, under the line "So about that MMO we're building…". Twenty-eight minutes later the game's executive producer, Fabrice Condominas, quoted that post and added one line of his own: "I can confirm that this project is not for the faint of heart".

Neither post mentions PvP. Within the hour, r/RiotMMO had a thread arguing that the two of them, read together with an old interview, pointed to a hardcore open world PvP game with loot dropped on death and almost no safe zones. The thread is worth taking seriously, because the reasoning in it is the reasoning most people will apply to the next fragment Riot releases. It is also wrong, and it is wrong in a way that is easy to show.

What Riot actually posted

The clip is Merrill answering a question about the MMO by declining to answer it. His interviewer presses for a title or a release date. Merrill gives neither, and instead describes how the team thinks about the job.

The cut is worth knowing about, because the whole session is public. Merrill gave the Storytime keynote at PAX West on Friday 4 September, and PAX put the full fifty-eight minutes on its own channel the same day. Riot picked thirty-nine seconds out of it. The MMO passage runs from about 34:30.

"We know what players' hopes and dreams are. It's just on us as a team, and people: can we succeed in the execution? What a worthy quest. Like, we jokingly call it the Grail internally, because we're like, many a brave knight are going to die on the Grail quest. But [expletive] it, it's the Grail, so let's go."

He closes by saying that mindset is "hard to do at scale", that he thinks the team is doing a reasonable job of it, and that the future is bright.

Two things in there are new. The first is the internal nickname: Riot's MMO is called the Grail inside the building. The second matters more. This is Riot's own corporate account, not a developer's personal one, talking about the MMO in the present tense for the first time since the March 2024 reset. The knights dying on the quest are Riot's developers, not its players. Merrill is describing attrition on a hard project, which is the same thing he has been describing since 2024.

What Condominas actually said

Condominas has run the project as executive producer since March 2024 and had not posted about it publicly in the two and a half years since. His line lands directly under the Grail image and inherits its subject. "Not for the faint of heart" attaches to the making of the game, not to the playing of it.

This is the hinge of the whole Reddit argument, and it turns the wrong way. A reader who arrives at the sentence cold, without the quoted post above it, can hear a promise of danger and death penalties. A reader who sees the two posts stacked, thirty minutes apart, sees a producer agreeing with his boss that the work is hard.

That the executive producer spoke at all is the more useful fact. Until 5 September 2026, every public word about this game since the reset came from Merrill alone.

The 2018 interview is from 2018

The third document is the load-bearing one, and it is old.

On 13 July 2018, Merrill sat for an hour and three quarters with Byron "Reckful" Bernstein on Tea Time with Byron. Around the ninety-minute mark, a developer in Bernstein's chat asked why no MMO since World of Warcraft has worked. Merrill's answer, in substance: the cost of reaching WoW's baseline runs to several hundred million dollars, which is why nobody tries. He then gave the analogy he has used for years, that EverQuest and WoW are Disneyland while League of Legends is basketball, because basketball's depth comes from other players and a mastery curve rather than from content a studio has to keep building. And he said he thought MMOs of the future would not look like current ones, that there was an opportunity to go "smaller" and "more hardcore", and that a niche product finds its niche everywhere in the world. His example was In-N-Out Burger: a short menu, done very well.

Those two words, smaller and more hardcore, are the entire basis for the open world PvP theory. Here is the problem with using them that way.

Start with the vocabulary. Twenty minutes after the Grail answer, still on the PAX stage in 2026, Merrill described where he thinks the games industry is going and said the job now is to "find those niches, find the incredible games". He talks like this about everything. A word he applies to the whole industry in 2026, and applied to the MMO genre in 2018, is not a signal about one game's PvP rules.

July 2018 is twenty-nine months before Riot announced the MMO, which Greg Street did on 17 December 2020. It is nearly six years before Merrill reset the project. Merrill was not describing the Runeterra MMO, because in July 2018 there was no publicly known Runeterra MMO to describe. He was talking about a category of game, in a podcast, in answer to an audience question about capital costs.

Reading it as a statement of current intent also requires ignoring what happened in between. The version of the game Merrill described in 2021, with its very large open world and its low-FOMO design, is the version he threw out in 2024 for not being different enough from what people can already play. If a 2021 spec written by the team building the game does not survive as evidence, a 2018 aside about the genre in general survives less.

What the thread got right

Two things, and they are not small.

The first is that this game is very likely to have PvP. Riot has never shipped a game whose centre was not players competing with players, and in June 2026 it hired Brian Holinka, who spent about five years running World of Warcraft's PvP, as principal game designer. That hire is real evidence, it is recent, and we go through what it implies in Holinka and the combat question. Open world PvP is one option among several, and nothing yet distinguishes it from the others.

The second is that Riot has shown interest in this corner of the genre. It approached Intrepid Studios, the maker of Ashes of Creation, about an investment or an acquisition, and Merrill confirmed in April 2026 that the talks happened and went nowhere. Ashes is a PvX game with open world flagging and node sieges. A company that looked hard at buying it has at least considered the shape. The full story of those talks is in Riot tried to buy Ashes of Creation.

Neither of those is what the thread claimed. Both are better arguments than the one it made.

The question he did not answer

Nine minutes before the end of the same session, the interviewer asked him directly: what does the future of Riot look like, where is this MMO, what is going on with Riftbound, where is another season of Arcane.

Merrill answered about Riftbound, then about League of Legends Classic, which shipped in July. Valorant followed, then Teamfight Tactics set 17, then Wild Rift. He finished by saying he was not there to promote anything, and moved on to thanking PAX for twenty years.

He did not mention the MMO, and nobody made him come back to it.

That is the shape of Riot's position on this game right now. A prepared metaphor when the subject is how hard the work is, and nothing at all when the question is where the work has got to.

What we do not know

Whether the MMO has open world PvP at all. Riot has not said, and neither has any developer on the team. Under that question sits a longer list with nothing attached to it: PvP servers, flagging, faction warfare, arenas, designated zones, a toggle, and whether anything drops on death.

We also cannot tell whether the 2018 remarks about going smaller and more hardcore describe the current direction, the pre-reset direction, or nothing beyond a podcast answer given two and a half years before the game was announced.

What the game is. Fifty-eight minutes on stage produced one metaphor and one dodge, and the choice of which thirty-nine seconds to amplify was made by Riot's social team: a company that had said nothing for two years decided that a Grail metaphor and a warning about difficulty were the parts worth putting out. No title, no date, no image, no genre detail, and no answer to the direct question. The rest of the dated record is in everything we know about the Riot MMO.

On 5 September 2026, Riot said the game exists, that it is hard, and that the team is proud of the attempt. That is more than the corporate account had said about it since the reset, and none of it is about PvP.