Marc Merrill - one of the co-founders of Riot Games and its current CPO - has spoken about the in-development MMO, describing it as "the grail" following the sudden end-of-development announcement for its fighting game 2XKO.
Speaking at Pax West 2026 with Greg Miller, Merrill spoke for around an hour about Riot Games' history and future projects. This included a brief exchange around its in-development MMO at the studio, as well as the soon-to-be shuttered free-to-play fighting game Riot released earlier this year.
"We know what players' hopes and dreams are," Merrill said. "It's just on us as a team and as people to succeed in the execution. What a worthy quest. We jokingly call it the grail internally because we're like 'f*ck it, many a brave knight are going to die'."
"But f*ck it, it's the grail so lets go. That's the mindset that we really try to cultivate, but it's really hard to do at scale. But I think we're doing a reasonable job and the future is incredibly bright."
This MMO, which has yet to be given a name (even a known project name), a release window, or even a confirmation on what sort of MMO it will be, has been in development for some time. Initially under the watchful eye of former Blizzard lead Greg Street, who left the company back in 2023, the project restarted development in the past few years. Merrill has previously said the game will be out before 2030, but precious little else about the project publicly.
This statement received an interesting response online. While some expressed excitement around the project despite the crumbs of information out there, many are skeptical of the project given the recent end-of-service announcement for its recently released fighting game 2XKO. A rising sentiment appears to be 'how can we trust this game will stick around?'
"They hyping up this MMO like they aren’t just going to shoot it in the face after six months cause it won’t be bigger than WoW," writes user Sloth on X. Another user, Red Riot Ross echoed similar sentiments, writing: "The only thing 2XKO sunsetting has done for riot is give laughably bad optics on anything they do/make going forward." Tsuki, another X user, posted: "Wait till they hear how FF14's first 3 years went," a reference to the rocky start Square Enix's MMO had before the game's rise to popularity with the 'A Realm Reborn' mulligan.
Riot when their MMO doesn't have half the player base and micro transactions of FF14/Wow in 3 minutes and 39 seconds after launch. https://t.co/BxMY9KDuC2 pic.twitter.com/pLY6Tj0mAW
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.eurogamer.net/riot-games-mmo-the-grail-pax-2xko
