Despite a cloud of doom and gloom hanging over Riot’s mysterious MMO in the wake of 2XKO’s closure–including well-founded concerns from our own Harvey Randall—its co-founder seems confident in its ongoing development. At least, that’s what I’m parsing from his relative non-answer when pressed about it during a panel at PAX West over the weekend.
Marc Merrill dropped a mention of the MMO while answering a different question during the panel, which was immediately chased up by host Greg Miller with half-joking prompts for further morsels of information. Merrill mostly laughs it off, but does give a somewhat half-answer that at least indicates development of it is moving along at… some sort of pace. Though Merrill’s description of creating an MMO makes it seem like it’s giving Riot a bit of a hard time.
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“We know what players’ hopes and dreams are,” he said. “And it’s on us as a team—can we exceed in the execution, you know? But what a worthy quest. We jokingly call it ‘the grail’ internally because we’re like ‘Fuck it, you know, many a brave knight are going to die on the grail quest. But fuck it, it’s the grail, so let’s go.’ That’s the mindset that we really try to cultivate and that is incredibly hard to do at scale. But I think we’re doing a reasonable job and I think the future’s incredibly bright.”
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I mean, I’ve never developed an MMO but… yeah, I suppose it’s probably an absolute task and a half to undertake. I don’t know if I necessarily would’ve gone all in on the grail and dying knight terminology since, y’know, that kind of makes me think about the layoffs. But hey, Merrill at the very least seems jazzed about the direction things are going in.
As for any sort of name (even a project name, damn), progression estimate, release date, or, well, any news of substance? Unfortunately, Merrill has absolutely nothing to offer us in that department. I’m just hoping we actually see this game manifest at some point in the future. And that Riot doesn’t cut and run quite as quickly as it did with 2XKO if it isn’t able to find its footing from day one.
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