Riot MMO: what is left of the 2021 vision after the reset

Between December 2020 and his departure in March 2023, Greg Street described the Riot MMO in enough detail to fill every "everything we know" article still online. In March 2024, Marc Merrill said that vision "wasn't different enough" and reset it. Riot has not said which parts were kept.

So here is each promise, with our estimate of whether it survived and why. The estimates are ours. The promises are Street's, and the reset is the only fact that bears on them.

The scorecard

Promise, 2021 to 2023 | Survived? | Why
Set across the regions of Runeterra | Almost certainly | The world is the product; the reset was about design
A "very large" open world | Likely | Runeterra's map is the reason the game exists
Third-person camera | Likely | The genre default, and Riot's art is built for it
Free-to-play, cosmetics, no subscription | Likely | Riot's only business model; a corporate decision, not a design one
Action combat, no tab-targeting | Uncertain | Holinka's hire in June 2026 points both ways
Persistent sandbox world | Uncertain | The vaguest promise, and the easiest to reset
Dungeons | Likely | Group PvE is the genre's spine and Runeterra's ruins are already designed
Raids, Baron Nashor as a boss | Probable, the boss less so | Street's own emphasis; the specific boss was an example, not a plan
Player housing | Uncertain | Expensive, loved, and the first thing cut in most MMOs' first years
Transmogrification | Likely | Doubles as the monetisation model
Fishing | Coin flip | Cheap to build, and mentioned only in passing
"Respects the player's time", low fear of missing out | The open question | The principle that most conflicts with how Riot's other games earn

The ones that survive because they are not design

The setting, the camera and the business model were never what Merrill objected to. His complaint was that the game was "an MMO that you've played before with a Runeterra coat of paint", which takes the coat of paint as given. Runeterra stays. A third-person camera stays because Riot's champions are drawn to be seen from behind and above. Free entry stays because Riot has never charged for a game it made, and the arguments for and against a change are in will the Riot MMO be free-to-play?.

None of that has been reconfirmed. All of it would be strange to reverse.

The ones the hires speak to

Combat is the promise with the most evidence either way, and the evidence is contradictory. Street was clear: action, not tab-target. Then in June 2026 Riot hired Brian Holinka, who led World of Warcraft's tab-target combat for four years and its PvP for five. Either the model changed with the reset, or Riot wants his discipline applied to a model he did not build. We weigh the two in what the Holinka hire tells us and lean, narrowly, to the second. On the scorecard that is "uncertain", because a lean is not a survival.

Dungeons and raids are the opposite case: the reset makes them more likely, not less. Group content against complex bosses was Street's own emphasis, it is where World of Warcraft's designers are strongest, and it is the hardest genre convention to be "different" about without losing the audience that came for it. The specific example, Baron Nashor, was a way of saying "bosses you already know", and we would not read more into it than that.

The ones that cost the most

Housing and a persistent sandbox are the promises most likely to have been simplified, for the same reason they always are: they are expensive systems that touch everything else. A reset is exactly the moment a team decides it cannot afford three of them.

Against that, Riot's budget is not a normal budget. A company that proposed spending up to $500 million on Ashes of Creation, an MMO whose whole design is player-built settlements, is not obviously a company that will cut housing to save money. The uncertainty here is about priorities, and priorities are precisely what a reset changes.

Transmogrification, meanwhile, is cheap, universally expected, and in a free game it is a revenue line. It stays.

The one that decides what "different enough" means

"Respecting the player's time" was not a feature. In Street's telling it was the reason to build the game: an MMO with less compulsion, fewer daily chores, less fear of missing a limited window. It was also the only part of the 2021 vision that was itself different from existing MMOs, which raises an awkward question about the reset. If the first vision "wasn't different enough", either that principle was not being delivered, or it was not enough on its own.

There is a further tension. Riot's free games run on seasons and passes, the machinery of exactly the compulsion Street wanted to avoid. A Riot MMO that keeps the 2021 principle would have to be funded some other way; one that drops it would be a Riot game in the ordinary sense. The reset post does not mention the principle at all. That silence is why it sits at the bottom of the table as the open question rather than as a survival or a loss.

How to use this list

Treat every row as a claim about the game Riot decided not to make, and every "likely" as our reading of the game it is making instead. When Riot shows something, this table gets rewritten, and the version of record will be everything we actually know about the Riot MMO, which keeps confirmed and pre-reset facts on separate lists for exactly this reason.

For the sequence in which the promises were made, and the reset that ended them, the dates are in the Riot MMO timeline.