Ex-World of Warcraft designer says the stagnating "meta" in today's RPGs "really sucks," and Marvel Rivals is a good example of how to solve it

Former Blizzard Entertainment developer Chris Kaleiki, who primarily worked as a class designer on evergreen mammoth World of Warcraft for 13 years, is gearing up to release an all-new game with a bunch of other ex-WoW, ex-AAA staff. And, surprisingly, he thought a lot about Marvel Rivals when solving an issue that permeates across many of today's roleplaying games.

Kaleiki now works as the boss of Notorious Studios, prepping the imminent early access release of its first game Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is mixing the get-in-get-out PvPvE gameplay of an extraction shooter with more traditional fantasy RPG trappings. It looks really cool, despite the really generic name.

But one problem that was on top of Kaleiki's mind during development was how the "meta" will often stagnate in modern RPGs and players will almost always declare that one character build is the "best for any given situation," he said in an interview with GamesRadar+. He then found some inspiration in the unlikeliest of places.

"The only solution I think is you have to change the meta continually," he continued. "If you look at Marvel Rivals, actually, it's kind of interesting what NetEase did. They have teamups where two heroes get a bonus if they play with each other, like Storm and I think Thor get something... What they're planning to do, which I think is smart, is that every season or every now and then they'll just change them."

NetEase have said that character teamups will rotate in and out every season or so to keep up with the game's evolving story, but also to encourage players to try out new combinations.

"So constantly the meta is shifting on the player, so players constantly have to re-evaluate and think through 'what is best, what is the new meta?' That's the only thing you can really do," he said. "I think players like it and developers like it. League of Legends does the same thing, they flip the board every time they do a season. This hero that was terrible before is now the best. DOTA does the same thing. That's what we've been seeing and I think it actually works pretty well."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery doesn't have teamups and special heroes to rejig every season, though, so how is it solving the problem? "Probably what we'll do in our game, we've been talking about adding different maps, and we'll have seasons in the game as well," he explained. "That's a whole other thing I learned from WoW about seasons. Maybe this season certain crafting materials are rarer than others and that can make different builds more common because you can create other items easier than you could last season."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery hits Steam early access on Febrary 12.

For now, don’t miss a single exciting release with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar.