A few weeks ago, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, the former executive producer on Riot Games’ League of Legends and a former systems designer on World of Warcraft, announced that he was leaving Riot to form his own studio and develop a new MMO. Today, another now-former World of Warcraft developer has announced that he is also leaving Blizzard to join Street on his project. It’s a big get for Ghostcrawler as he’s bringing in the former lead combat designer for WoW Brian Holinka.ย
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Holinka has been at Blizzard for nearly 11 years. He joined in 2012 and was immediately made one of the company’s most important voices in PvP design. Since then, Holinka has moved around a bit, including jumping off the WoW train onto an unannounced project for a year in 2017; however, he’s been settled in his role as the head of combat design since 2018. There, he has a hand in every piece of combat World of Warcraft puts out, including class design and PVP content.
Needless to say, if you were building an MMO from the groundup like Ghostcrawler’s new studio is doing, having someone with the knowledge Holink does would be invaluable. He’s been doing this for more than a decade and knows how to make MMO combat better than just about anyone. Launching a new MMO in the modern era is going to be incredibly difficult, but Ghostcrawler’s team is looking up to the task more and more as they bring on new members.
Unfortunately, the announcement doesn’t come with any new information about the studio. We still don’t know its name or any game details yet. That said, Street only made the announcement a few weeks ago, so we’re likely looking at a wait of at least a few years before this MMO is out in the wild. While we wait for more info about the game and studio, it will definitely be worth paying attention to Blizzard to see if any of Holinka or Street’s old developer buddies also jump ship to join them on this new venture.
