There’s no other genre as scary to tackle as the MMO. The most successful MMORPGs – the likes of World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14, OSRS, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online – sit atop an ever-growing mountain of failures and cancellations. Even FF14 once had to discard its own corpse upon the pile to take a second swing at greatness. Many of those that survived have done so by finding ways to pull back on the genre’s traditional grand ambitions. Yet despite this graveyard of dreams, the Riot MMO is still pushing forward – because, in studio Co-founder Marc Merrill’s words, it’s “The Grail.”
Riot Games first announced its plans to build an MMO in late 2020, but in March 2024 Merrill revealed that the developer had made the decision to “reset the direction of the project,” explaining that its “initial vision just wasn’t different enough from what you can play today.” Since then, the studio has brought on talent including ex-WoW Lead Combat Designer Brian Holinka. Speaking at PAX West 2026 this weekend, Merrill – known as ‘Tryndamere’ to the League of Legends community – touched tantalizingly on the team’s upcoming creation.
Merrill was in the process of discussing why “delivering an incredible game is by far and away the most important thing” before thinking about expanding it out with projects such as Arcane for League of Legends. “That in and of itself is incredibly hard, because what you need to do there, of course, is have these insanely passionate, insanely talented people who are willing to go through the pain of understanding all these player needs and solving all these thousands of little problems to try to do justice to what player expectations are.”
“The MMO we’re building, as an example – we know what players’ hopes and dreams are, and all that. And it’s just on us as a team of people: can we succeed in the execution, you know? But what a worthy quest.” It’s a mammoth, risky task, and Merrill admits as such, but he says the potential to succeed in creating the next great MMO is worth it.
“We jokingly call it ‘The Grail’ internally,” he remarks, “because we’re like, ‘Fuck it – 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 hard to do at scale. But I think we’re doing a reasonable job and I think the future’s incredibly bright.”
It’s certainly a bold statement to make, especially given that Riot Games recently announced that it is planning to end active development for its League of Legends fighter, 2XKO, in December, less than a year after launch. It explained that “while a lot of you jumped in to try the game and there’s an incredible community that plays every day, we haven’t seen enough players stick with the game to get a path toward sustainability.”
Convincing players that your new MMO is worthy of their time and money is a big ask – even if what you have is strong, you might need to sustain until the major contenders have enough downtime that players look for alternatives to fill it. If Riot is actually able to clasp ‘The Grail,’ will it have the confidence to hold firmly to it while the ground shakes around them? Or will it drop it and run at the first sign of the floor falling? Only time will tell.