One former World of Warcraft veteran has officially joined Riot Games on its long-awaited League of Legends MMO, which is clearly still trucking on in the background.
Brian Holinka took to Twitter yesterday with the news, announcing: "First official day at Riot Games working on the League of Legends MMO!" Per his LinkedIn page, he's now the MMO's principal game designer.
It's definitely safe to say that Holinka is experienced when it comes to MMOs. He spent almost 11 full years at Blizzard before leaving in 2023, in which time he served as World of Warcraft's lead PvP designer, before going on to become the lead combat designer, leading the "team responsible for all combat-related systems for World of Warcraft, including class design and player versus player content," as described on his LinkedIn.
After that, he joined Fantastic Pixel Castle as gameplay design director – a studio led by former League of Legends MMO lead Greg Street, who was making a whole new MMO codenamed Ghost. Sadly, however, the studio was shut down last year after parting ways with NetEase Games, and while Street noted at the time that "there is still a chance we can secure funding after that date," ultimately, "it will depend on how much of the team remains."
Now, though, Holinka has taken his talents to Riot. We still know incredibly little about the League of Legends MMO, which was announced back in 2020. With that said, only a couple of months ago, Riot co-founder Marc Merrill stated that the studio is "more committed to" the idea of making a great MMO "than ever" before, and bringing in new folks like Holinka certainly suggests that effort is being made.
Holinka isn't the only WoW veteran to join the team, either. Former World of Warcraft lead producer Raymond Bartos announced that he'd joined Riot's project at the start of the year as senior game producer, and in doing so, he reunited with Orlando Salvatore – once a lead software engineer at Blizzard, and now senior engineering manager on the LoL MMO. Needless to say, there's a strong team behind the upcoming game – let's just hope it won't be that much longer before we can actually see it in action.
For now, you can check out our list of the best MMOs to play today.
