Key Diablo 4 dev leaves Blizzard after 16 years to work on secret Riot Games project
Riot GamesAdam Jackson, a developer at Blizzard who played a crucial part in designing Diablo 4, has left the company after almost 2 decades to take on a completely unannounced project at Riot Games.
Though he started his time at Blizzard as a QA analyst, he gradually worked his way up the ladder by filling various roles on Heroes of the Storm and eventually becoming Lead Class Designer on Diablo 4.
If there are abilities you loved in Diablo 4 both at launch and past it, Jackson was likely the mastermind behind them. He managed class design for years before the game came out and has been the lead designer for expansions like Vessel of Hatred and new seasons post-launch.
However, he’s decided it’s time for a career change. He’ll be working as a Senior Manager on a Riot project that hasn’t even been announced yet.
Riot grabs major Diablo 4 talent for their next “big bet”
Riot Games is now infamous for taking forever to finish new games. But, when they release something, it tends to be worth the wait.
From starting with just League of Legends and re-defining the multiplayer games space with the free-to-play model to their success with Valorant and TFT, as well as the hype around the upcoming 2XKO, anything that comes out of Riot is bound to get attention.
However, there’s one game that’s been up in the air from them: An MMO.
Riot GamesIt’s been in development for years and has seen various staff changes that have put its existence in peril during that time. Riot’s been quiet on their MMO for ages, with the company’s co-founder Marc Merrill confirming development had been reset in 2024.
With Jackson joining Riot Games to work on an unannounced project, hope has returned that we’ll actually get that League of Legends MMO one day.
Riot has started ramping up job openings for their MMO in general, and they’re clearly expanding efforts to get the game out the door. But Riot’s MMO has also been announced and is a known quantity. That likely isn’t what Jackson is working on. No, there’s evidence that this is something else entirely.
He’s publicly confirmed that he can’t say a word about what he’s actually working on, but has referred to it as an “unannounced title”.
There are several job listings on Riot’s jobs page for an unannounced project. Their MMO has its own category on the site, so this “unannounced title” seems to be a separate thing.
One of the job listings on Riot’s site described the project as the gaming giant’s “next big bet.”
“As a Game Designer III on an unpublished R&D product, you will help decipher one of Riot’s next big bets. You will develop characters, rapidly creating prototype content, improving content creation tools, and verifying our driving hypotheses.”
Art roles for this R&D product are also specifically looking for people experienced in “stylized game art” to help develop the project, and other listings related to Software Engineering reveal that the game will be developed in some form of Unreal Engine.
As a result, there’s a chance Riot is working on an action RPG similar to Diablo. Hiring someone of Jackson’s pedigree would make a lot of sense if they were trying to break into the ARPG genre, but details on this project are extremely sparse and nothing is set in stone.
Arcane really blew the lid open on the League of Legends universe, with Riot exploring several parts of their lore that have never had an opportunity to shine in LoL proper.
Whether this unannounced project is in the League of Legends universe or a new IP entirely, it’s likely we won’t see anything about it for years to come.
As for Diablo 4, Jackson played a major role in ongoing development and regularly appeared on Campfire Chats, the main way D4 devs communicate with players about upcoming updates. It isn’t clear who will fill his shoes and how the devs plan to move forward without him.