New game development status revealed through recruitment announcements

It has been reported that Riot Games is secretly developing an action RPG based on the League of Legends (LoL) universe. Two contract job postings recently posted on Riot Games' recruitment page are lending support to this speculation.

According to related industry reports, a project in the early research and development (R&D) stage appears to be underway at Riot's Shanghai studio. The first job posting is for a 'combat game designer' position, and a small team is looking for talent to build and iteratively improve the combat system from scratch in an Unreal Engine-based action/ARPG genre game. The second announcement is recruiting CG animators with experience working on stylized characters.

Although both recruitment announcements did not specify the project name, understanding of the League of Legends IP is offered as a preferential condition, so it is analyzed that the background is likely to be 'Runeterra', the LoL universe.

A signal for the expansion of the LoL franchise

This news comes at a time when Riot Games is expanding the LoL franchise into unprecedented territory. Earlier this year, Riot hired Raymond Bartosz, a former senior producer on World of Warcraft, as a senior game producer for the long-in-development LoL MMO project. This greeting implied that the project, which had been reset in 2024, had finally entered the full-scale development stage.

However, it appears that the MMO isn't the only new LoL-related work Riot is preparing. The job posting for a combat game designer requires a deep understanding of action games and ARPGs, especially expertise in combat feel, mechanics, and AI, suggesting it is a fairly large project.

Riot’s multi-genre strategy

Riot Games has expanded its portfolio beyond the existing LoL MOBA to various genres such as Valorant (FPS), Team Fight Tactics (Auto Battler), and Legends of Runeterra (card game). If MMO and ARPG are added here, the long-term strategy of building a comprehensive game ecosystem centered on the Runeterra worldview becomes clearer.