The Man Who Built Ultima Online Just Explained Why Every MMO Since WoW Feels the Same

What Happened

Raph Koster spent 22 minutes explaining why every MMO since 2004 feels like a variation on the same game, and the explanation is almost word for word the reason Riot tore its own Runeterra MMO down to the studs in 2024.

The film went up July 21, 2026 on /noclip, the crowdfunded documentary channel. Runtime is 22:29. Koster is the right person to narrate it: he was creative lead on Ultima Online, creative director on Star Wars Galaxies, and worked on EverQuest II. That is the sandbox branch of the genre, the one that predates the modern template and mostly lost to it.

The chapter list is the argument. Multi User Dungeons at 00:00, Inventing Video Game Genres at 04:20, Ultima Online at 07:15, World of Warcraft at 13:09, then two chapters that have nothing to do with any specific game: The History of Social Play at 15:00 and All Games are Social Spaces at 17:33. noclip describes it as tracing group play from MUDs to Azeroth, and as far back as the Bronze Age.

Koster’s claim in the back half is that group play is older than the medium. People organised themselves into raids and guilds and rivalries long before a server was involved, and the games that stuck were the ones that gave that behaviour somewhere to happen. His read on the post-WoW era is that the genre stopped experimenting with what a world could be once WoW settled what an MMO looks like.

The film is also a pitch, and it is worth saying so plainly. Koster’s studio Playable Worlds is building Stars Reach, a sandbox MMO where players reshape the planets they live on. It is on Steam with no release date announced. A designer arguing that the genre got too narrow while shipping the wide version of it is not a neutral historian, but the history he walks through is the actual history.

The Details

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Merrill’s reset note is a one-sentence version of Koster’s 22 minutes. "Not different enough from what you can play today" is the same diagnosis, applied to one game instead of a whole genre. Riot looked at its own build, saw the post-WoW template staring back, and started over rather than ship it.

The sharper thing is what Riot did next. That October 2025 job description called the game a "persistent sandbox world," and sandbox is Koster’s lineage. It runs through Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, not through WoW. Meanwhile the leadership Riot has actually assembled is WoW people: Brian Holinka, ex-lead combat and PvP designer; Raymond Bartos, ex-lead producer; Orlando Salvatore, ex-lead engineer.

Riot hired the theme-park school to build a sandbox. Koster’s history is a decent explanation of why those two traditions pull in opposite directions. Theme-park design is about authoring the experience beat by beat and shipping it reliably. Sandbox design is about building rules loose enough that players author it themselves and then living with what they do. The first is a production discipline. The second is a tolerance for chaos.

Read that tension into the specific problems Riot has to solve and it gets concrete fast. Group content is the obvious one: Blizzard’s own answer to the race to tag a boss, which we covered in the new Lairs system, is a theme-park fix for a theme-park failure, and Riot inherits the same question the moment two strangers want the same target. Player appetite is the other: when a new MMO’s alpha testers were surveyed, 40% called themselves raid perfectionists, and the rest of that split is the part worth reading, because it is where the sandbox audience actually lives.

Koster’s closing chapter argues that all games are social spaces. Applied to Riot, that is a warning about what happens when a world tries to substitute for people. We wrote about the one-man MMO whose raids run 14 bots to your one human, and about the original hardcore MMO relaunching for solo players. Both are the genre quietly conceding that other people are the hard part. A Runeterra MMO where the reason to log in is a loot table has already lost the argument Koster is making.

The commercial frame matters too, and it is the part where we have to be careful. Riot has never put a business model on the record for this game. When a competitor draws a line, like Aion 2 committing to a $15 sub and no pay-to-win, Riot gets judged against it whether it has said anything or not. And corporate reality is close by: Final Fantasy XIV’s mobile version died after 15 months at the hands of Riot’s own parent company.

The Runeterra Read

Here is the part that should make Riot optimistic. Koster’s argument is that worlds work when they are places people inhabit together, and place is the one thing Riot has been compounding for nearly seventeen years without a game to spend it on.

Watch A New Dawn, the 2014 League cinematic, with the social-play chapters fresh. It opens on the world before it opens on anybody: jungle, broken stone, one figure moving through it alone. Then it fills up with people who want different things.

The cast is a spread of the map rather than a faction. Leona out of Targon, Darius and Katarina out of Noxus, Ahri out of Ionia, Nautilus up out of the water. Nothing about that fight is scripted content in the fiction. It is people with incompatible goals meeting in a place, which is Koster’s definition of the thing MMOs are for.

The places are already written down, with detail well past what a splash screen needs. The Great City of Demacia is a capital built on outlawing magic. Nashramae is a Shuriman trade city with its own politics. Bilgewater Bay is a port that runs on debts and grudges. Kinkou Monastery is an order with a doctrine to break. The Howling Abyss is a hole in the Freljord that nobody sane goes near. Those are social spaces before they are zones: each one is a reason for a group of players to have an argument.

None of that tells you what Riot is building. It tells you what Riot has to draw on. Whether any of these places is in the game, and how much of this map you will ever stand on, has not been revealed.

Koster’s film ends on the claim that the social layer is what people actually remember. Riot has the world, the characters, and nearly seventeen years of players who already argue about them. The open question is whether the studio that hired WoW’s combat lead can resist building WoW’s content structure around them.

Your Take

Reported from /noclip and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.