Riot MMO: everything we actually know in 2026

On 1 June 2026, Brian Holinka started work at Riot Games as Principal Game Designer on a game with no title, no screenshot and no release date. Holinka spent eleven years at Blizzard, about five of them as World of Warcraft's lead PvP designer and more than four as its lead combat designer. Nobody hires that CV to explore ideas. You hire it to build combat.

That is the Riot MMO in September 2026: complete public silence, and a hiring pattern that says the opposite of silence. Everything on this page is dated and sourced. Where Riot has said something, we quote it. Where the press has filled a gap with an estimate, we say so. When something changes, this page changes with it.

The short version

Riot Games is making an MMORPG set in Runeterra, the world of League of Legends. That has been confirmed since 17 December 2020.

The project was reset in March 2024. Marc Merrill, Riot's co-founder, said the first version "wasn't different enough from what you can play today". Since then the studio has said almost nothing in public and has hired steadily in private.

The only date Riot has ever given is "before 2030". The 2028 to 2029 window quoted in most coverage is an estimate that originated on Wikipedia, not an announcement.

It runs on Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine 5 is likely and has not been confirmed for this project.

No title, no footage, no screenshots and no leaked assets exist. Six years after the announcement, that is close to unique for a game of this size.

The team was rebuilt around World of Warcraft veterans: Orlando Salvatore in 2024, Raymond Bartos in January 2026, Brian Holinka in June 2026, under Executive Producer Fabrice Condominas, who came from BioWare.

The "cancellation" reported in March 2026 concerned Project T, Riot's shooter set in the Valorant universe. Not this game.

What Riot has actually said, in order

Riot teased an MMO during its tenth-anniversary broadcast in October 2019. Fourteen months later, on 17 December 2020, Greg Street confirmed it. Street was then a Riot vice president and had been World of Warcraft's lead systems designer, which is why the announcement travelled so far. Riot opened a recruiting page the same week. It is still online, and it still says the studio has no specific openings but wants to hear from people with MMO experience in gameplay engineering, design, UX, art and production.

Through 2021 and 2022, Street described the game in broad strokes: a "very large" open world, a design that respects the player's time, less fear of missing out than the genre usually runs on. Those interviews are the source of nearly every "what we know" article still ranking for this game. They also all predate the reset. We list them separately, below, because they no longer describe the game being built.

Street left Riot in March 2023 after nine years. On 13 October 2023, Riot folded the MMO into one Runeterra canon shared with Arcane and Legends of Runeterra. That sounds administrative and is not: whatever Arcane establishes now binds what the MMO can tell.

Then the reset. In March 2024, Merrill posted that "after a lot of reflection and discussion, we've decided to reset the direction of the project some time ago", that the initial vision "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today", and that Riot did not want "an MMO that you've played before with a Runeterra coat of paint". The project would go dark, he said, "likely for several years". 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 EA and BioWare.

Since the reset, Riot has said four things on the record.

November 2024. Merrill: the team "has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum". The same month, Orlando Salvatore, formerly of Blizzard, was reported as the MMO's new engineering manager.

18 February 2025, at the DICE Summit. Asked by Game File's Stephen Totilo whether an MMO was still worth pursuing, Merrill answered "Oh yeah", then: "It's probably the project I personally spend the most time on."

15 April 2026. Merrill confirmed that Riot had explored investing in or acquiring Intrepid Studios, the maker of Ashes of Creation, and had chosen not to proceed.

The game will ship "before 2030".

That is the complete list. Four statements in thirty months, and one of them is a date with no month attached.

What expired with the reset

Everything in this section was said or reported between 2020 and 2023. None of it has been repeated since March 2024. Merrill's reset post was, specifically, a statement that the game described by these points was not different enough to ship. Read them as history.

Third-person perspective.

Action combat rather than tab-targeting.

A persistent world with sandbox elements.

Free-to-play, funded by cosmetics, with a subscription described as unlikely.

A "very large" open world across the regions of Runeterra. Coverage of the period named Demacia, Noxus, the Freljord, Piltover, Zaun, Shurima, Targon, Ixtal, Bilgewater, the Shadow Isles, Bandle City and the Void, plus lesser-known places such as Camavor and Kathkan.

Dungeons and raids. Street talked about group fights against complex bosses, and Baron Nashor was floated as a candidate.

Player housing, transmogrification and fishing all came up in interviews and developer Q&As.

Some of this will survive. Riot is not going to throw away Runeterra's map, and a Riot game that charges up front would be a first for the company. But "will probably survive" is not "confirmed", and most articles about this game still present the 2021 list in the present tense. That is the single most common error in coverage of the Riot MMO, and it is why this page separates the two.

Who is building it

Person | Role on the MMO | Before | Since
Marc Merrill | Riot co-founder and chief product officer; supervises the project directly | Riot | Announced the reset, March 2024
Fabrice Condominas | Executive Producer | BioWare and EA: Mass Effect 3, Andromeda, Star Wars: Squadrons | March 2024
Brian Holinka | Principal Game Designer | Blizzard, eleven years: lead PvP designer, then lead combat designer on World of Warcraft | 1 June 2026
Raymond Bartos | Senior Game Producer | Blizzard: lead producer on World of Warcraft | 15 January 2026
Orlando Salvatore | Engineering Manager | Blizzard | 2024

The pattern is easier to read than any statement. Salvatore, Bartos and Holinka come from World of Warcraft's engineering, production and combat teams respectively. A studio does not recruit a lead combat designer to a project that is still deciding what it is. We go through what each hire implies in the WoW all-star team and, for combat specifically, in what the Holinka hire tells us.

The counter-signal is turnover. The project has lost its founder, Street, in 2023, and its technical director in December 2024, a departure the press noticed only in February. Mark "Scruffy" Yetter, League's long-time gameplay design director, moved over as the MMO's game director in 2021. His role after the reset has never been clarified in public, so we do not list him as current.

The engine, the platform, the money

Unreal Engine is confirmed. Riot presented a multi-game, Unreal-based development stack at Unreal Fest 2024, and moved Valorant onto Unreal Engine 5 with patch 11.02 on 29 July 2025. Unreal Engine 5 for the MMO is the obvious inference. It remains an inference.

Platform: nothing announced. PC is a safe assumption for a Riot game. Console is a guess.

Business model: free-to-play with cosmetic monetisation was the stated intent before the reset and is the model of every Riot game to date. We treat it as likely, and go through the reasons it might not hold in will the Riot MMO be free-to-play?

Budget: Riot has never published one. The nearest public figure is indirect. In December 2022, Riot's chief financial officer wrote to Intrepid Studios proposing an acquisition, with a figure reported at $250 to $500 million. That deal did not happen, and Merrill confirmed the approach in April 2026. A company willing to spend that on someone else's MMO is not short of money for its own. The full story is in when Riot offered $500 million for Ashes of Creation.

The rumours, sorted

The March 2026 panic. On the night of 23 to 24 March 2026, the leaker @BigBadBear_ reported that Riot was overhauling or cancelling "Project T". Within hours, headlines had the Riot MMO cancelled. Project T is a different game: a multiplayer shooter in the Valorant universe, described in job listings as an MMOFPS, run by Matt Zitterman, formerly production director on Destiny 2. Nothing in the leak concerned the Runeterra MMO. We take the episode apart in the March 2026 cancellation rumour, and explain the other game in Project T, Riot's other MMO.

The "Genshin-style" League game. The same leak claimed a third project, an open-world League game with mobile in scope. Single source, unconfirmed by Riot, and unrelated to the MMO as far as anyone has shown.

The 2028 to 2029 release window. An estimate, repeated until it read like a fact. The only official statement is "before 2030", and we explain how to read it in why "before 2030", and not sooner.

The cancellation itself. Asked directly, the answer is no, and the evidence is in is the Riot MMO cancelled?

What we do not know

The title. Riot has filed no trademark that fits. The nine "Legends of Runeterra" marks from October 2018 cover the card game.

The era. Contemporary with Arcane, or somewhere else on Runeterra's timeline? Riot has not said, and the answer decides which champions can appear at all.

Whether champions are playable, non-player characters, bosses, or absent.

The class system, the combat model after the reset, housing, the shape of PvP, the size of the team. None of it has been stated.

Whether the pre-reset promises about respecting the player's time survived the reset, or were part of what was reset.

We would rather list these than guess at them. The guessing is done, clearly labelled, in our design articles.

How to follow this without being misled

Four things to watch. LinkedIn, where the ex-Blizzard hires announced themselves before any press did. Riot's MMO recruiting page, where the appearance of specific openings would be a signal in itself. Massively Overpowered's Riot MMO tag, which has tracked the project since 2020 and corrects its own errors. And a short calendar of moments when Riot tends to talk: the DICE Summit in February, GDC in March, League's anniversary in October, and Worlds in October and November.

One thing to ignore: any account that reports a cancellation without naming which Riot project it means.

For the dated record of everything above, in one list, see the Riot MMO timeline. If you arrived here from Arcane and want the world before the game, start with what is Runeterra?