The game got expansions and was a critical darling, but it petered out, got shuffled around in a firesale when Trion went under, and now it’s in a maintenance mode that has never officially been called that, with fans still hoping for a resurrection but being continually disappointed despite all of the good stuff that is in the game. How’d that work out for you? Look, thinking about RIFT makes a lot of people sad right now. That’s kind of a big gamble, in other words. Remember how I mentioned throwing down the gauntlet before? RIFT literally went there with advertisements claiming, “ We’re not in Azeroth anymore,” which is definitely some big energy but also is going to really backfire unless you can back it up by being absolutely rock-solid and exquisite on every level. The bad news is that it fell hard from its initial population burst, it’s long floundered a bit in design, and the total amount of content in the game’s most recent expansion can be finished in less time than it will take you to read through this column from beginning to end. How’d that work out for you? Well, the good news is that it’s still running now and it has gotten expansions. You can almost hear the muttered, “ This time we’re going to get them.” It’s a lot like WoW, but it has story, it has lightsabers, it has a familiar faction split, and so forth. It was very clear at launch that while no one was saying it out loud, Star Wars: The Old Republic was Electronic Arts trying again to do what it had already failed at once with Warhammer Online. How’d that work out for you? Well, the game went down for maintenance and then never came back, although its owner still says it’s going to happen – perhaps even in the near future. It was kind of a low-rent knockoff from the word go, although later developments made it at least a little bit more unique and more of its own thing. Yes, someone will no doubt deny this, but it was very clear from playing it that Alganon was WoW with an added skill system stapled to the side. Never really made the splash that was expected, though, and doesn’t get any attention from Funcom now.
How’d that work out for you? It got expansions! It’s in a quiet maintenance mode now, but it did earns some expansions and kind of slowly walked along to that point, so that’s something. And it very much was in that same general vein of “here’s an MMO with way more blood and guts and visual signifiers of maturity, play a real title.” In a more mature fashion than that, thankfully, but only just. Part of the same release year as the prior title, Age of Conan didn’t really try to pit itself against WoW in the same way, but comparisons were inevitable. So… not great! This one didn’t turn out super. How’d that work out for you? Well, the game shut down after completely failing to make a free-to-play pivot and never launching an expansion, although there is a good rogue server keeping it alive nowadays. This was just shy of throwing down the gauntlet directly.
Between its split into two factions (as opposed to Warhammer’s usual nature of being split into about four dozen factions at a minimum), its class design, and so forth, Warhammer Online very clearly positioned itself as the death metal headbanging older cousin of WoW that even had the unmitigated cheek to come out with Wrath of the Lich King due for the same year. Some of these stories wind up sadder than others I’m just going to warn you about that right now. Whether from developer interviews, design principles, release dates, or just general vibe, today I’m looking at games that looked at the biggest guy in the metaphorical prison yard and decided to start there in their quest to become top dog. The games on this list, however… all kind of did. Now, obviously, this did not stop other MMOs from coming out and many of them from being successful, but none of the current big games that are not WoW (and several second-tier games that are still doing fine) came out trying to pick a fight directly with WoW.
The fact that we currently have a Big Five in the MMO space is a big change from not so long ago, when the market was so thoroughly dominated by World of Warcraft that everyone else kind of slid into the “other” category.
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