When Greg Street left Blizzard, the big question was obvious. Why? Why would anyone leave a high-profile job working on the most profitable video game on the planet? What possible opportunity could have tempted him away? Now we have our answer. Ghostcrawler is the new lead game designer at Riot Games, working on League of Legends and sharing a title with Morello.
The announcement is not much of a shock. The number of games that could seriously tempt someone away from World of Warcraft in terms of potential is embarrassingly small despite the MMO giant’s steady bleed of subscriptions over the past couple years.
League of Legends has grown vastly even in those couple of years since the Cataclysm expansion was released, and does require a great deal of constant work to remain reasonably balanced; and game balance was always what Ghostcrawler was best known for being in charge of at Blizzard. There are few gaming companies which seem as certain to be able to deliver on their promises as Riot Games.
Morello has gone on the forums to assure people that, despite Street sharing his title, the Blizzard vet has not taken his job, merely that the game has grown sufficiently to require more than one person in the position. When one person made the comparison to Warcraft dungeon-running, asking who would run a dungeon with two tanks, Morello did not miss a beat, responding in language any MMO fan can appreciate.
“We’re big enough to be a raid now.”
Hopefully this will at least allow the balancing work to be spread a bit more to allow closer care to be taken with League of Legends. Ghostcrawler has his share of haters, now is his chance to show them that he’s not actually as bad at the job as they think.
