2011s most important MMO

Every year new IP come, every year new IP go. But the ebb and flow of new games that get lost in a wasteland of sales bins at GAME is one of the real tragedies of this medium. And I write that with the kind of sober seriousness of someone who has waded through the beige gruel of forgotten MMOs and WoW clones that have slid out of development and into oblivion.

As much as I love World of Warcraft, it's provided the gilded barrier-to-entry for every developer unwilling to either clone Blizzard's formula for success or adopt a free-to-play model. And this is why RIFT is this year's surprise success story.

Few games since WoW's release have sold themselves on the basis of not being World of Warcraft, but when RIFT was first being marketed with the intention of becoming the WoW player's alternative to WoW, it included this line in its advertising: "You're not in Azeroth anymore", something that signalled an ideological change in how to make and sell an MMO.

Competitors took notice early on. A strategically timed major patch came out of the Blizzard quarry about a month after Trion released the game. Even BioWare's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning mysteriously lost its "cancel subscription" button around RIFT's launch, which may or may not have been down to coincidence.

Even so, RIFT became the first MMO of this year to seemingly make a dent in WoW's side, making the subscription-based MMO genre seem like less of an unbreakable monopoly than it had previously been for a near decade. It did this as an entirely new IP - one that lacked the brand name backing of Star Wars.

So when, by May of this year, Cataclysm failed to keep users hungry enough to stick around and 600K of its playerbase mysteriously vanished, the RIFT makers were happy to take the blame - suggesting a subscriber base of over half a million.

It would be wrong to only point the finger at Trion for this - by that point Blizzard had run its MMO for six years, had three expansions under its belt, and a playerbase who had experienced most of what the game could give them. But RIFT proved important for demonstrating how Blizzard's upward trajectory could be broken, even briefly.

While Trion's game itself wasn't a complete revelation in how to make an MMO - it's an altogether traditional title in practice- it marks a defining point in time where AAA MMOs began to change at a philosophical level.

What has followed since the beginning of the year is a tangible sea change in the market where not being WoW is a marketable value. By 2012 we'll see the affect of SWTOR (a fantastic game better left judged in the new year when we really see what it's made of), the likes of experimental titles such as The Secret World, and with any luck Guild Wars 2. 2011 was the year we started to see MMOs take steps out of Blizzard's shadow, and regardless of how many subscribers WoW picks up by the time of its next expansion, we'll continue to see more games testing the boundaries outside of Warcraft's formula over the next year.