When having a computer at home became commonplace in the 1990s, an entire generation of kids immediately smuggled games onto them. “Look, this box can help do the taxes!” “Sure, dad, but it can also run Quest for Glory 2: Trial By Fire.” Games in genres that were perfect for a mouse-and-keyboard setup, like point-and-click adventures, flight sims, first-person shooters, strategy games, and—when CD-ROMs became a thing—FMV games all thrived.
In the 2000s, things changed. PC gaming spent a decade having reports of its death greatly exaggerated, often by publishers and developers who declared it a wretched hive of pirates. In 2008, Cliff Bleszinski said, “I think the PC is just in disarray.” It wasn’t just the big boys being mean either, with even Mads Wibroe of indie darling Playdead claiming piracy was the reason Limbo launched as an Xbox 360-exclusive in 2010.
And then in 2011 Playdead’s Limbo and Supergiant’s Bastion crossed the border separating Xbox Live Arcade from PCs. Both studios’ follow-up games, Inside and Transistor, would have simultaneous cross-platform launches. Clearly, a lesson had been learned.
Mainstream publishers seemed to learn it too. After saving the PC version of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood for March of 2011, several months after its console release, Ubisoft gave Assassin’s Creed: Revelations a simultaneous cross-platform launch in November of the same year. Console exclusivity wasn’t dead, but it was developing a persistent cough.
The PC Gaming Alliance’s Horizons Research 2011 report documented a 15% rise in profits in 2011, with $18.6 billion spent on PC gaming. A significant chunk of that was thanks to China, where consoles had been banned since 2000, and where League of Legends had just launched. Free-to-play games were doing so well that games like Everquest 2, Team Fortress 2, and DC Universe Online successfully made the switch in 2011.
Beyond the business side, it was also a great year for games generally—and especially ones in genres that were increasingly at home on PC again, like open worlds and singleplayer RPGs.
The open world genre peaks (and you can climb them)
Open world games are a natural fit for PC, because when you ascend to the top of a mountain or a skyscraper you want a draw distance that at least lets you see all the way back down to the bottom. As a genre defined by its empty spaces, it’s also a perfect place for modding to fill those gaps, and the release of Skyrim in 2011 turned out to be massive for mods. To this day the only game with more downloads on Nexus Mods than Skyrim is Skyrim Special Edition.
Looking back, part of what was special about Skyrim—especially in a year with two Assassin’s Creed games in it—was right there on its map. Open that thing up and you see cities and towns, giant camps, standing stones, bandit hideouts, dungeons. You see places rather than activities, and they’re not marked on your map when you climb a nearby tower, but when you actually go to them.
In 2011 open world fatigue was a long way off, and it wasn’t just because of Skyrim. We also had Batman: Arkham City, which came at the genre from a different angle. Specifically, from above, hurtling down to land a shockwave in the middle of a gang of the Penguin’s thugs.
Arkham City may be stuffed with collectibles and political prisoners to rescue, but it makes getting around so enjoyable you don’t care. Seeing a Riddler trophy out in the bay is an excuse to grapple to the top of the tallest building you can find and swoop out to reach it, with movement mechanics that never get old. And which felt great on mouse and keyboard as well as controller. The best way to play is with both, seamlessly switching between the two as the situation demands, which games support as a matter of course nowadays, but seemed revolutionary at the time.
While hooning around Steelport in Saints Row: The Third was also a riot, like a version of Grand Theft Auto 4 that actually wanted you to drive the cars like you’d stolen them, the side activities maintained the series’ sense of the absurd. Escort quests are fine, it turns out, if you’re escorting a tiger in the passenger seat that takes a chunk out of your flesh whenever you slow down.
The worst thing about open world games in 2011 was that they were so popular other games were being dunked in them for no good reason, with L.A. Noire and Mafia 2 perfect examples. Both would be fine if you stripped away all that driving past empty backlots in favor of a linear structure.
RPGs return (and briefly bring immersive sims with them)
It’s dated discourse now, but in the early 2000s the success of MMORPGs had fans convinced the singleplayer RPG was dying (you know, like PC gaming was). To be fair, BioWare did shelve Knights of the Old Republic 3 and recycle it into Star Wars: The Old Republic in 2011, but it was also a year in which the singleplayer RPG thrived.
Skyrim was the big-ticket success, but it wasn’t alone. Though it came out in 2010, Fallout: New Vegas only got good in 2011 with the release of excellent expansions like Old World Blues and a series of patches that stabilized it and dealt with questbreaking bugs like the one that made recruiting ED-E a crapshoot. Easy to forget now, but at the time half of us played New Vegas without its lovable robotic mascot because for months after release the quest to repair him was so likely to bug out.
The Witcher 2 was a pleasant surprise, improving on the original as dramatically as The Witcher 3 would eventually improve on The Witcher 2. The narrative took risks, with a branch that meant two players might experience a completely different second act, and the combat was actually decent—if badly tutorialized.
It looked gorgeous too, at least if you ignored how much Geralt resembled beef jerky. The low fog clinging to the ground in the forest outside Flotsam, the grotesque monsters, and the haunted battlefield where dead men fought eternally beneath unnatural skies all looked amazing, and gave us a reason to upgrade our rigs. If you turn on ubersampling and cinematic depth of field today it’ll still hit your framerate like a silver sword to a drowner’s neck.
As well as The Old Republic, busy BioWare also gave us Dragon Age 2, a game that was compromised, but better on PC. I know because I stupidly played it on Xbox 360 first, where you had to button-mash for every attack, making it feel like a bad action game instead of the modestly decent RPG it revealed itself to be when I replayed it on PC—where each combat requires a more sensible number of leisurely mouse clicks.
It was also home to some of the finest companions any game in the series has ever had. Rushed and repeated as Dragon Age 2, it still gave us the likes of Varric, Avelline, and Isabella, who remain up there with BioWare’s best.
The immersive sim made a comeback with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where immersive sim is a technical term that means “videogame mostly about reading people’s emails.” Like all immersive sims it’s really just an RPG where the boxes have physics, and it’s an exemplar of the form. Honestly, the worst thing about Human Revolution was that it gave us hope that Thief 4 would be good. Wait, no, it was the boss fights—but at least they fixed those in the director’s cut.
On the lower-budget side of things, Dungeons of Dredmor, Avadon: The Black Fortress, EYE: Divine Cybermancy, Cthulhu Saves the World, and Costume Quest (another one-year-later console port) helped showed how much variety the RPG genre was capable of.
Not only but also
As the release of Bastion and Limbo suggests, 2011 was a great time for indie games on PC—especially ones that established a niche big-budget games ignored. With SpaceChem, Zachtronics laid down the format for a whole subgenre of programming puzzle games, while Terraria took the survival crafting loop of Minecraft (which also released version 1.0 in 2011, though everyone played it at least the year before in beta) and made that a genre too. Arrowhead’s Magicka laid down a legacy of friendly-fire multiplayer chaos that would continue in Helldivers, and The Binding of Isaac basically invented the modern roguelike.
Strategy games had a good time with Total War: Shogun 2 winning back all the goodwill that Empire had lost—because the AI knew how to use boats this time. It was also the year of Anno 2070, Unity of Command, Fate of the World, Frozen Synapse, and Men Of War: Assault Squad. If only XCOM hadn’t been delayed from late 2011 into 2012, which would have made my argument even easier.
All that and Portal 2 too. Look, there are plenty of years people talk about as being all-time greats, but a lot of them are great for videogames more generally. What people usually mean by a certain year being great for games is “this is a year in which a particularly beloved Zelda game came out”. But 2011 is one of those years where PC gaming specifically thrived, and it wasn’t a sure thing. We’d been through a rough patch, and 2011 was when PC gaming’s return to prominence began.
