Riot Games is recruiting for a "massive" new game project, which we learned today will be an MMO set in League of Legends' Runeterra universe. The company's VP of IP and Entertainment, Greg Street, nonchalantly confirmed it on Twitter today.
"My recent job at Riot has been to help develop the League universe, which we’re going to need! Because it is time," he wrote. "My new job is to kick off a big (some might say massive) game that many of you, and many Rioters, have been asking us to create."
When asked bluntly whether the game is an MMO, Street replied: "It is an MMO".
Following Street's tweet, I contacted Riot Games PR, who provided the following response: "Greg's tweet is our only official statement at this time. I can confirm that he will be working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)."
To say that League fans have been "asking" for an MMO is a bit of an understatement: the audience has been demanding it for years. Instead of MMOs they've received Legends of Runeterra, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and LoL Esports Manager—as well as the non-Runeterra FPS Valorant.
It is an MMODecember 18, 2020
So it's about time, but as Riot CEO Marc Merrill noted late last year, a new MMO is a massive undertaking, even if you're rolling in cash. "I would love to make an MMO, but just to manage expectations, if we were to do something like that it wouldn’t be any time soon,” he told YouTuber Travis Gafford (via Dot Esports), adding that shipping an MMO is like "shipping a freaking rocket—it’s so much work, it’s so hard to do, and we would really try to do it justice, and that’s not easy."
Details are obviously thin right now, and as Street noted in his tweet, Riot is currently hiring for the project, so it's probably a long ways off.
