Former Blizzard Entertainment developer Chris Kaleiki, who primarily worked as a class designer on evergreen mammoth World of Warcraft for 13 years, is gearing up to release an all-new game with a bunch of other ex-WoW, ex-AAA staff.
And, surprisingly, he thought a lot about Marvel Rivals when solving an issue that permeates across many of today's roleplaying games.
Kaleiki now works as the boss of Notorious Studios, prepping the imminent early access release of its first game Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is mixing the get-in-get-out PvPvE gameplay of an extraction shooter with more traditional fantasy RPG trappings.
It looks really cool, despite the really generic name. But one problem that was on top of Kaleiki's mind during development was how the "meta" will often stagnate in modern RPGs and players will almost always declare that one character build is the "best for any given situation," he said in an interview with GamesRadar+.
He then found some inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. "The only solution I think is you have to change the meta continually," he continued. "If you look at Marvel Rivals, actually, it's kind of interesting what NetEase did.