Long time players may remember Brian as the highly visible lead PvP designer on World of Warcraft, though Brian Holinka acutally began his career in the video games industry as one of the core creators the popular Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 while serving as a Captain in the United States Air Force, which led to working on first and third-person shooters with DICE, Trauma Studios, THQ, High Moon Studios, and Kaos Studios over the following eight years. He then joined Blizzard Entertainment as Lead PvP Designer in 2012, focusing on making Player-versus-Player content and systems a bigger and more accessible part of World of Warcraft. After five years in that role, Holinka announced that he would be leaving WoW to join an unannounced Blizzard project as a Senior Designer, returning in 2018 as Lead Combat Designer for all of World of Warcraft - heading the entire class and combat design team, where he oversaw aspects such as the return of expanded talent trees in Dragonflight.
Holinka discusses PvP, solo queue, and cross faction PvP in Dragonflight.
Finally leaving Blizzard in 2023 to join Greg Street's remote studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle, Holinka worked for two years as the gameplay design director of the MMO Project Ghost, though despite the participation of several other Blizzard/Riot alumni, that ambition sadly came to an end late last year... like so many other new startups in an increasingly difficult and ever changing industry.
Just before its shutdown, Greg Street, Scott Johnson, and Brian Holinka discussed the classes and combat of Fantastic Pixel Castle's MMO, Project Ghost.
With today marking his first day on the job, little has been shared of his new role with Riot Games, except that he'll be working as a principal game designer. Even less has been shared about the game itself, which was initially being headed by the same Greg Street before stepping down to pursue his independent dream, either causing or as part of a complete development reset for the project. Since then, the only update has been a somewhat hopeful idea of releasing before 2030, though the still untitled Runeterra MMO continues to hire on industry veterans and Riot is reportedly "more committed than ever" to its development, despite no gameplay footage, screenshots, trailers, or game-specific artwork having been shared. Here's hoping that Brian's decades of experience serve them well.
New MMOs have become an increasingly risky venture, as more games shut down.
