Riot Games is expanding its footprint in the United States from the current Santa Monica, San Francisco, and St Louis offices with a new studio to be set up in Seattle Washington. This Pacific North West office will work primarily on Valorant and Riot Games’ upcoming MMORPG.
Riot’s new location would be its fourth campus on the west coast, but the move away from its California studio also means moving away from the title that made the studio what it is today. League of Legends won’t be the main focus of Riot’s Seattle location. Instead, Valorant and Riot’s mysterious MMO that’s currently in development will be the immediate focus, with the possibility of other titles like the fighting game Project L joining the others in the future.
Riot Games announced the purchase of the 156,000 square foot lot in the Seattle area on Mercer Island with a post on its website. Riot currently has more than 20 offices worldwide already but only three in North America. The current plans involve a staff of over 400 members of Riot covering the usual development roles at a studio. While the official description only mentions Valorant, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street posted to Twitter to specify that Riot’s new studio will also focus on their biggest project yet.
There’s no announcement about the MMORPG yet, with it only going into the very opening stages of developments in recent years.
Such a huge project will take a long time and fans shouldn’t expect to see a full release of Riot’s MMO any time before five years from now, and likely longer than that. Riot Games tends to be more than happy to take their time before entering a game genre like with Valorant, and the MMO will be no exception.
For fans looking to get in on this latest project, Ghostcrawler has previously announced that Riot specifically plans to hire some employees for the MMO that don’t have any game development experience.
The MMO is set up to take place in League of Legends’ world of Runeterra, but is likely separate from the mutable canon of current-day League of Legends. More news is sure to follow about the timeline for the studio’s construction and what titles it will be developing.
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