Ex-World of Warcraft/Riot designer Greg Street building new fantasy MMO

NetEase announced the hiring of Greg Street as a designer. World of WarcraftBlizzard and League of Legends Riot Games is looking for a leader to head a brand new studio that will be building a fantasy massively multi-player game.

Street’s studio is called Fantastic Pixel Castle and the “AAA MMO” game it’s working on is codenamed Ghost. It is set in an entirely new fantasy universe.

Street was well-known to him WoW He was known as Ghostcrawler in the community and worked at Blizzard from 2008 to 2013, at the peak of the popularity of the game. His job included evolving the design and adjusting the balance of the character classes — a contentious area, to the say the least — and he was famed for his open engagement with the community in often forthright and funny exchanges on the official forums.

Street, who left Blizzard in 2010, worked as the lead game designer at Riot Games, where he brought his expertise for online gaming to first. League of LegendsLater, it will spin off a MMO that is still unreleased. The Street announced his departure from RiotThis year’s March is a big month.

Street is a hugely experienced technical designer who has worked on two of the biggest online games of all time, so he’s quite a scalp for NetEase. After its bitter break-up with Activision Blizzard, the Chinese gaming giant has increased its investment in studios. NetEase founded recently studios that include Star Wars MMO veteran Rich Vogel as well as Yakuza creator Toshihiro Ngoshi.

NetEase says Street’s founding team at Fantastic Pixel Castle includes former WoW, LoLThen, Guild Wars 2 developers. Street says that the studio is being built on remote working principles, will be recruiting globally, will stay small and nimble, and wants to show the game to fans “early and often” to get feedback. The studio just launched its new website. It will also be live streaming Ghost at Twitch, on Sunday 8th November from 2pm ET. ET.