Riot's Invisible MMO Keeps Poaching WoW Veterans

Brian Holinka spent nearly 11 years at Blizzard shaping how World of Warcraft's combat felt. He led PvP design. He led combat design. He oversaw class balance for one of the most scrutinised MMOs ever made. On June 1, he announced on X that his first official day at Riot Games had arrived, working as principal game designer on the League of Legends MMO.

According to his LinkedIn page, Holinka's role started this month. Before joining Riot, he'd spent time at Fantastic Pixel Castle, the studio founded by former LoL MMO lead Greg Street to build an MMO codenamed Ghost. That studio shut down last year after losing its partnership with NetEase Games, scattering its developers across the industry. Holinka landed at Riot. Given his résumé, it's easy to see why they wanted him.

He's not the only former Blizzard hand working on the project. Earlier this year, former World of Warcraft lead producer Raymond Bartos announced he'd joined Riot as senior game producer on the MMO. Orlando Salvatore, once a lead software engineer at Blizzard, is already there as senior engineering manager. Riot is assembling what looks like a WoW reunion tour.

A Roster With No Game to Show

Here's what makes all of this so strange: the League of Legends MMO was announced in December 2020. We are now approaching six years since that reveal. In that time, the project lost its original leader in Greg Street, went through a full development reset after Riot decided the initial direction wasn't distinct enough from existing MMOs, survived a round of over 500 layoffs at the company, and has never shown a single screenshot, trailer, or gameplay clip to the public.

Six years of silence from a studio that runs one of the most popular games on the planet. I struggle to think of another project from a major publisher that has operated this deep in the shadows for this long while still actively hiring senior talent. The closest comparison might be Blizzard's own Titan, the MMO that burned through years of development before being scrapped entirely and reworked into Overwatch. That's not a comforting parallel.

The last substantial public comment came from Riot co-founder Marc Merrill, who said back in late 2024 that the studio is "more committed to" making a great MMO "than ever" and that the team has "a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum." As reported by PCGamesN, Merrill has also described the MMO as the project he personally spends the most time on. Those are encouraging words, but words are all we've had for half a decade.

I don't doubt Riot's sincerity here. You don't keep hiring people of Holinka's calibre for a project you're about to quietly shelve. The investment is real. But the complete absence of anything tangible to show the public creates a vacuum that gets harder to fill with every passing year. MMO audiences are patient by nature, but patience has limits, and right now Riot is asking people to stay excited about a game that exists entirely as a series of LinkedIn job updates and executive quotes.

The WoW Pipeline

The pattern of hiring from Blizzard specifically is interesting. World of Warcraft, for all its ups and downs, remains the gold standard for MMO combat feel. Pulling in the people who built those systems suggests Riot wants its game to play with that level of responsiveness and depth. Holinka in particular is a telling hire. His background is almost entirely in how players fight each other and how classes interact. If Riot's MMO is going to lean into PvP, and given that League of Legends is a competitive game it would be bizarre if it didn't, Holinka is one of the best people in the industry to design those systems.

But there's a tension between building a team of proven MMO veterans and starting from a reset that Riot itself described as necessary because the game wasn't unique enough. These are designers whose instincts were shaped by WoW. Riot needs them to bring their expertise without just rebuilding what they already made. Striking that balance is the entire challenge of this project.

For now, the LoL MMO remains one of the biggest question marks in the industry. Riot clearly believes in it enough to keep stacking the roster with expensive, experienced hires. Whether that belief translates into something players can actually see before the project hits its seventh birthday is another matter entirely. At some point, the hiring announcements need to give way to a reveal. Holinka's start date is June 2026. Riot's clock keeps ticking.