The League of Legends MMO is still rumbling quietly in the background, as evidenced by a name-drop from one of Riot's co-founders.
Last month, Marc 'Tryndamere' Merrill, Riot's co-founder and chief product officer, spoke about his company's culture and design philosophies on stage at the D.I.C.E. conference. Those comments were then picked up by LoL lorekeeper Necrit, who outlined Merrill's (brief) suggestion that the company's long-struggling MMO project was still alive, despite its many tribulations.
Towards the end of his speech, Merrill explained that it was Riot's hope to continue "to earn the opportunity to serve [the League of Legends] community for a long time to come."
That, he says, is a sentiment with which Riot should continue to approach new ideas and projects, whether that be "getting back to fundamentals" in long-running games like LoL and Valorant, or "setting our sights on new crazy ambitious challenges that we're trying to tackle, like finding ways to add value to the [Fighting Game Community] or even perhaps the MMO community."
The FGC is likely to be better served by Riot in the short term - Riot's two-character fighter 2KXO is steadily making its way to release. By contrast, the MMO community likely has a lot longer to wait, as the LoL MMO isn't really anywhere to be seen.
The most recent update before DICE came in November 2024, when Merrill admitted the LoL MMO had "a lot of momentum", and that it was the project he was spending the most time on. That came after a "reset" at the start of 2024 - four years into the project - when Riot said it was "going dark".
In the time since its initial reveal, the LoL MMO has left several core developers, including its lead, who had alluded to the fact that Riot would be prepared to cancel the entire project if it wasn't good enough. That's not necessarily the type of news you want to hear as someone with an interest in an upcoming project, especially when we've seen almost nothing of the MMO since then.
Two years ago, almost to the day, I said that I was "starting to get really worried" about this game - and I'm not sure I feel much better about it yet.
