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Riot MMO isn’t coming soon, but is faithful to League of Legends lore

The mysterious Riot MMO remains shrouded in a veil of secrecy, but a recent interview with its producer confirms it will remain true to League of Legends' lore

A woman with long black hair in a ponytail wearing a nurse outfit and a mask holds her finger to her lips shushing someone

The elusive Riot MMO remains one of the company’s most exciting announcements to date – especially given that it will be set in the world of Runeterra, the setting that frames iconic MOBA League of Legends. While details remain thin on the ground, a recent interview with executive producer Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street confirms that, wild fan theories aside, it will remain faithful to LoL’s extensive lore.

One of League of Legends’ main pulls is its spectacular character design and rich lore system. Not only do characters look good, they’re all unique individuals with compelling backstories that, in many ways, make them more akin to real people than virtual heroes and heroines.

With recent champion K’Sante embodying queer black culture, Summoner’s Rift has become a place that contains echoes of our real world, making it a home away from home for a lot of players.

The groundwork has been laid for a World of Warcraft-style universe, and in a recent interview with Lost Ark content creator and Twitch streamer Kanonxo ‘Kanon’ executive producer Greg Street has confirmed that Riot will build upon LoL’s existing lore.

“Without giving any announcements I can tell you about how we at Riot think about [lore],” Street says. “We want players to have that investment. The way we think about it is that there are core truths about the world and its characters, and if you violate those, that’s pretty risky.”

Taking DC icon Batman as his example, he states that most people wouldn’t be interested in a game that sees the Dark Knight trade out his signature stealth mechanics to go in all guns blazing with a katana. “We think, for the most part, players just want to feel like [character actions] are true to that character; ‘oh, Garen would do that, Akali behaves the way I thought she would based on watching cinematics and K/DA.”

When asked how Riot plans to manage all of the various races we see in Runeterra, Street states “we don’t have a lot of standard fantasy races; it’s honestly a very human-centric IP.” This doesn’t rule out playing as Vastaya or some sort of Void-contorted monster, but we may see humans being the standard race in the MMO – at least initially.

The related segment begins at 1:16:20, which Kanon has helpfully timestamped.

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However, Street promptly shuts down my conspiracy theories by noting that “players have made a lot of assumptions, and some of them are just flat out wrong – and that’s been fun for us.”

And as for a release date, there’s no new information here sadly. “We want to be able to communicate when we have real information,” he says. “When we’re comfortable with that we’ll start talking about it more, and it’s not going to be a grand reveal – it’ll be a slow trickle that goes on for a long time.”

While we wait for the curtains to be pulled back, there’s always League of Legends to keep you busy. We’ve got a rundown of everything that’s coming as part of the League of Legends preseason 2023 update, as well as the League of Legends 12.21 patch notes, which added new top lane terror K’Sante to the game.