"All this drama is making me want to fart all over that Alextrasza hussy!"

Back when Trion Worlds unveiled their Rift pre-launch trailer a couple months ago, they took a mixture of cheers and criticism for using the tagline “We’re not in Azeroth anymore.” By drawing a comparison to the top-of-the-market MMO from the start, it seemed the game was inviting more of a comparison from gamers familiar to the world of Azeroth who would instead argue that Rift was a WoW clone, or that it had drawn ideas and parallels to WoW.

I’m not here to argue for or against that — I personally have not played Rift, so I’m not qualified to make that comparison. And while I do love WoW, I also wouldn’t call myself a fangirl. There’s many aspects of the game that I feel could be improved upon, and in fact I hope that strong competition continues to come forward so that Blizzard is forced to keep innovating and keeping Azeroth a fun place to be.

But I do think that Trion Worlds’ assertive stance against WoW in the trailer was a bold marketing move that has worked. It brought a buzz about Rift. Even those who were openly decrying the tagline were still talking about the game. And a lot of people who otherwise may have never looked into the game were exposed to news about it from WoW-centric blogs who covered the trailer because of that open comparison. Perhaps this is where trouble began to brew. Continue Reading