Riot Games is “still working hard on” its MMO, according to co-founder Marc Merrill.
We got a brief update over the weekend at the League of Legends Worlds championship on the game thanks to a moment in the broadcast where caster Cadrael ask in the chat if anyone had questions for Merrill and “the whole chat was spamming MMO”. Riot’s rich roster of characters and investment in lore over the years clearly hasn;t gone unnoticed.
Merrill had this to say (lightly edited for clarity):
“We're working hard on it and you know it's the project I spend personally the most amount of time on. I really think the team has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum and you know it's something where we know the expectations that we have and we're going to we're going to really try not to disappoint.”
We did say it was a brief update, but there hasn't been much in a while. Riot Games is one of the companies that has announced a number of layoffs and project cancellations. At the time of those layoffs, they did announce that the MMO was still in development. Last month, Riot hired former WoW dev Orlando Salvatore as Engineering Manager on the MMO. Salvatore was key to Plunderstorm (which returns early next year) and Mists of Pandaria Remx.
Over on Reddit, the update was met with a mix of optimism for whatever eventually comes out, to skepticism. Some refer to the team having pulled back and started over to nail down development direction, which Merrill’s statement did address.
For anyone paying attention, we know that anything isn’t likely to materialize for years, but an update is still an update.
