Alot of Hype about this game that bombed. Is it true it sucked that bad?

bortiis · January 2008

I was just curious. I was never impressed with the screenshots and could never understand why all the game mags were in love with it while in development. Then it comes out and all the bad reviews. Is it true this game really does suck buffalo balls or is it a decent play. plz tell.

Clatil · January 2008

I played this game when it first came out years ago. At the time I was a big Everquest player at it was a refreshing change because the leveling was much faster and easier. The most fun aspect of the game that I remember was the PvP, and that was basically the whole point of the game. It had a very real feel because players built up their own cities, sieged other cities, and could attack any player any time. Theres something really cool about being able to backstab or pickpocket anyone you see. I remember as I first started playing I was in the biggest guild and I happened to walk by the Leader of the guild. I was rather curious, and just working on my pickpocket ability so I figured I would check out his lootz. He immediately turned around and slaughtered me in one shot and told me "Pick-pocket anyone again and you're banished and KoS." Thats just something I'll always remember about the game, and I loved it for the real feeling it had. But then it kinda sputtered out for me, not enough high end stuff to do. I never played the expansions or anyhting, but i'd imagine the game is still pretty fun.

Kyleran · January 2008

The game play was good, the stuttering, lagging, crashing servers were not. Also, although the player created towns were a great idea, a poor mechanic let other clans attack most of the buildings in them (except for 7 protected by the Core Tree) when no one was around to defend them.

This enabled zerg West Coast Guilds to raid everyone else at midnight their time, (3 am EST) and wipe them out with no opposition. I would have stayed had they extended the tree protection to every structure in the town (then you couldn't attack them without a declared war time/date) and cleaned up the server performance a bit.

The classes were quite fun, I used ot hate those darn thieves, but it was fun to catch and kill them when you could.

A little more cash and I think SB could have been a decent success.

Somnulus · January 2008

That is a really hard question to answer because it depends on what would satisfy you in the type of game that Shadowbane was.

So here is a list of things that were very robust and interesting about Shadowbane;

1. The ability to build your own cities and nations, literally from the ground up, to include actual buildings, merchants, city guards, walls, defenses, and to improve, level and manage them all.

2. The nation-building process as a whole, to include the ability to make alliances with other nations that showed visibly on a world map so that the players would know what the status of any city they came to was at a glance.

3. The ability to lay siege to other nations by attacking and destroying their cities using siege engines, stealth and other siege equipment.

As the attacker, you could decide whether to actually try to destroy the nation (by trying to destroy their Tree of Life, the necessary item for starting a city for your nation) or to simply bane the Tree of Life to allow you to cause enormous amounts of damage to their city which could often be much more demoralizing.

Maintaining the city and leveling vendors, guards and even just maintaining your city walls was enormously expensive and a constant drain on resources, so it could have a much more severe impact on a nation to just constantly burn their city to the ground but leave their tree standing.

4. Open PvP from level 1, which made life interesting. The impact of dying in PvP was pretty minimal overall (although different servers could have different rule sets) so normally you would only lose any actual money you had on you.

Here's a list of things that were poor, bad or bugged about Shadowbane;

1. There were quite a few bugs and exploits that would allow you to copy items or produce gold which made it possible for a nation to easily maintain top tier cities with massive defenses with little to no farming for gold.

2. Point and click movement. Some like it, many do not, particularly for a PvP game.

3. Imbalanced classes, which tended to give PvP dominance to a small cluster of classes.

4. A near-total lack of any content outside of farming, building/maintaining your city(ies) or PvP. There were no real quests at all, particularly in the beginning although I think they started adding quests in later.

5. Some serious difficulty in traveling from continent to continent due to the limitations on what classes could use items that allowed travel and the lack of open cities. While this makes sense from a PvP standpoint, it could make the game pretty stale after a while if you weren't in one of the larger nations because you would end up confined to a relatively small area.

6. Bugs in the siege process that could allow a city to be invulnerable to attack or make it so that it was impossible to destroy the Tree of Life. Of course, that would have a pretty large impact on sieges in general, one if not the main component of the game.

7. Graphical glitches and poor overall game performance in general.

8. Generally lackluster graphics. The thing is, given the time period the game was produced and the level of player interaction with the world itself, as well as the PvP-centric focus of the game, that would be understandable so that the developer could try to keep frame rates up.

However, that isn't what happened. There was still considerable lag, particularly in large sieges but even in the middle of absolutely nowhere, during simple PvE.

9. The grind. Farming and grinding constantly was the only way to maintain your city(ies). Kill, loot, gather, sell, pay your maintenance. Rinse, repeat.

Then someone comes along and basically wipes out several weeks or months of work in one short or long battle. Ouch. Many gamers just didn't have the mindset that allowed them to say "oh well" and keep soldiering on, particularly when there was nothing else to do but that.

10. Steep learning curve in some cases on skills and their effects, runestones, items and equipment and managing all of that, along with all of your city management tools all the way down to the lowest levels.

There are many other things that impacted negatively on Shadowbane, but the concept and basic design was actually very progressive, particularly if you were a hard-core PvP-er. If it had more non-PvP activities to get that cross-section of soft PvP players and at least intrigue players who were mainly PvE, along with solid gameplay, it may have been more successful.

Iijs · January 2008

Shadowbane was in beta for 2+ years, which at the time was considerable, yet they shipped with bugs galore, crashes to desktop, excessive rubber-banding, login issues, etc,

And perhaps the most damaging of all, rampant duping.

But it was playable, fun, and the small-group pvp was fun.

Their motto, Play To Crush, was prophetic. Guilds got crushed, people left the game. Combined with all the other issues, it was doomed from the start.

10 initial servers with decent population. Within a few months, 8 out of 10 were deserted.

Vetarnias · January 2008

I discovered Shadowbane only during the latest holidays because of a moment of intense boredom. Some online friends and I were playing another free MMO game before and were getting tired of it, so we decided to try it out. The nature of my work being such that I have plenty of spare time at this period of the year, I immersed myself into the game as much as I could, sometimes for hours at a time and I often played in the middle of the night. I probably heard about the game at the time of its launch; one of my friends used to subscribe to one of those gaming magazines (until he realized that it usually fawned over every major release whose publisher heavily advertised in its pages, and only dumped on the unequivocally bad or minor stuff that was otherwise harmless) and used to talk about new games all the time, but I did not make much of it. I do vaguely recall having heard that blurb about crushing and not baking bread, but I couldn't say where or when I first encountered it, but it encapsulates all that is problematic about the game.

Since I only played for less than a month before giving it up, I can't make comparisons with what it used to be like when it was subscription-based, and I can't discuss the impacts of the major hacking that went on in those days. All I can say is that I have the impression of witnessing a game that is more or less in its death throes, deserted by most players and now home to the maniacal player killers without any sense of purpose beyond, well, crushing.

We started out on Mourning, which of the non-loreplay servers proved the better choice, for I have since found out that guilds of Chinese (or CN in game lingo) players have basically taken over Redemption, Braialla and to a large extent Wrath, capturing every city on the map and destroying any political competition that may have existed; and without such competition there is basically nothing left, except farming or player killing. But those two options make no sense since that accumulated wealth is just going to sit in the bank unused, because there is no way in the game one person or even a small guild that managed to buy a city could ever seriously think of defending it.

I can say now that the best time I have had on Mourning was when I was levelling my character on Newbie Island, blissfully unaware of the greater perils awaiting me outside of this small haven. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those "carebears" everybody sneers at; I want PvP as much as the next guy, and it's a major (if not the central) part of Shadowbane. But I want my PvP to make sense. I don't want to be killed by a player 30 levels above me who kills me for no other reason than because he can, or because he fancies the handful of coins in my inventory and that it's far more interesting to take it from the middleman than spend hours killing spawns for it. With the guild system in place I was expecting the PvP to come in the form of ambushes against players of enemy nations, or extended sieges. The closest to this I can claim to have seen came while claiming or defending mines, but for the most part the player-killing seemed gratuitous and aimless.

In fact, after getting killed more than a few times outside King's Cross (one of the game-run cities on the main continent) for no reason at all, my friends and I were thinking of quitting the game, and in fact it was only thanks to the eleventh-hour intervention of a Good Samaritan that we were convinced to continue playing. He told us to seek Dragonscale, a guild-nation that had a wide reputation for accepting newbies.

Through strange twists of fate, we ended up in Divinity, a guild that had pledged allegiance to the Dragonscale nation and which controlled a small city in the middle of the main continent, while granting us access, through our affiliation, to the better-equipped cities of Dragonscale. I accumulated a fair amount of money and eventually opened a forge in our city, then called Kings Gambit. I had enough money to train my swordsmith up to level 5 and to hire two other weaponsmiths; overall, maybe 2.5 million had been invested in the forge.

Then weird things started happening. Divinity broke its affiliation with Dragonscale to become its own nation, shutting us out of the better places for equipment and advanced training. In the meantime, we were automatically shuffled inside a guild called Blood Rose, that pledged allegiance to Divinity. At the same time, an expelled member (on suspicion of treason or something like that, I never knew the full story) came back with a few of his buddies and periodically killed anyone who was unfortunate enough to hang out in town. In what was the pinnacle of stupidity, two players part of our group defending the town, knowing full well that another attack was imminent, decided to go on duelling one another. Not surprisingly, when the enemy showed up they were among the first killed. Then the next day, Divinity dropped its dream of nationhood to pledge allegiance to another nation, but Blood Rose didn't follow and went back to Dragonscale, shutting us out of Kings Gambit. (The city has now fallen to another clan, so it's a moot point now).

That incident basically made us decide to start over on Vindication, where we hoped the more restrictive rules would lead to a... shall we say mature?... player core. Also, to avoid being shuffled around like on Mourning without having any say over it, we decided to start our own guild as soon as we could afford it. Unfortunately, the loreplay rules may have made sense on a busy server in the game's heyday (if it ever had one), but on an essentially deserted game it meant we were confined to one city (we were a ranger guild, so Wood's Hollow was our only option) and that we did not have much of a choice in terms of what other guilds we could join (as we could only pledge allegiance to another ranger nation, of which to my knowledge there was only one). For a game that prides itself on being as anarchic as possible (though what it achieved is less anarchy than nihilism, an even less pleasant result), those were very limited choices indeed.

The end, for me, on Vindication came when I discovered I could not even pick a deserted spot far away from general attention and put together a few buildings. I gathered enough money to buy an inn deed from the Runemaster, which I figured was a good place to start since you could place a builder and a steward inside of it. And the manual sort of said in passing that it was a logical choice as well: "Most Buildings and structures will be associated with a city – that is, within the influence of a Tree of Life. They need not be – an isolated Inn built at a distant crossroads is perfectly valid. Players may call any collection of buildings a city, but without a Tree of Life to define its influence, such cities will not appear on the interactive World Map or receive their own regional designation on other players’ maps." (p. 124). So based on this information which all but proves that it can be done, I get to the location and start placing my building when I get the message that I can't place it outside of the fortress zone. Even leaving all affiliation with Wood's Hollow changes nothing to this hard reality -- the building can't be placed outside of the fortress zone. And how, pray tell, do you get a fortress zone? Well, in theory, you just have to buy one of those expensive tree-of-life acorns and start a city. Except that each region will only accommodate a maximum number of such trees, a number that was, needless to say, reached long ago. To start a new city, therefore, you need to take one down, and that is not about to happen when you're an up-and-coming guild with a handful of members equipped only with the second-rate wares sold at one of the developer-created free cities. And because Wood's Hollow had no builder, and that the Runemaster only sold limited building deeds (and no housing whatsoever), there went any hope of every buying so much as a cottage, let alone a forge or a bank, which are probably restricted in placement anyway, without first joining up with a city-owning guild, which guild would probably decide who can place such buildings and where (in other words, not us). Even more troubling is that the inner workings of a game should so blatantly contradict the manual, unless of course those inns to which it refers happened to have been placed at distant crossroads by the developers themselves; such instances always seem to scream -- run away, and fast.

I am walking rather than running away, and watching over my shoulder at a game that had so much potential but came up short on so many points. I am fully aware that, as a general rule, solipsisms do not make a convincing argument. Yet these happenings ruined the gaming experience for me, and I will try to summarize them in a more general way in a nutshell:

1) Triumph of the Lowest Common Denominator: Maybe it was more mature when it was pay-to-play, though I suspect immature brats with rich dads have been, and will always be, found playing such games. The problem with Shadowbane is that in the absence of anything else (except maybe for a guild system that proved deficient) it had nothing to do but encourage such activity. As I said before, there is a place for PvP, but it has to make sense in the larger sphere of things. A level-75 scout ganking a level-22 fighter just off Newbie Island makes no sense whatsoever, both in-game and from a business perspective (as Ubisoft undoubtedly found out). The mantra of such player-killers has always been, based on what I have read, to blame the technical glitches for the game's failures. Yes, that sb.exe crash is annoying, but it does not explain everything.

2) A decent game world woefully underused. I like the Shadowbane world atmosphere; it's gloomy, and deals in extremes. The desert stifles; the north is a perpetual snowstorm; the valleys and mountains go from foggy to dark. It all reminds me of the film "Excalibur", and this is completely appropriate for this type of game. The designers obviously understood what their game was all about, but they made sure at the same time that most of the land would never be worth anything. First, a few spawn sites sought after by all guilds. Second, player cities built not far from there. Third, heavily contended mines. And then the rest, a vast, useless expanse that is not only never developed but also never travelled extensively. These restrictions basically made sure the game would not turn into one giant SimCity, especially since there was too much land for the number of players (and even worse now). But at the same time they destroyed any sense of a universe that developed, or could be developed, as a whole, where the fate of one city would affect an entire region. Develop a town, fortify it, and leave the outside to the wolves became the modus operandi.

Teleportation made the matter worse, as you no longer needed to actually physically travel from one place to another. It also made open cities even more vulnerable (what's the point of assaulting fortifications when you can just teleport to the middle of town?), while leaving other towns closed to all but those who had bound to their tree. If on top of that, you cannot build most buildings unless they're inside the fortress zone, you have a nice, beautiful, empty world, whose players are forced by the developers to fight over limited resources (such as mines) instead of giving free rein to the builders as well. Not that I would do away with the element of risk involved with building, which is one of the better ideas in Shadowbane. If you're playing a game set in 1940 London, it's normal to expect that your forty-room mansion could be flattened by German bombers overnight. But don't force me to build in restrictive specific locations, especially if those zones are to be developed only on Winston Churchill's say-so in the first place.

3) The guild system was a nice touch, but what happens when a handful of guilds (or just a big one, for that matter) hold power and appear to be untouchable? There has to be a method of striking back, and indeed there have been other examples of MMO games where prominent groups have been kicked out of power by rebel alliances and dark horses nobody had heard about before. But here you just take over a city, then the next, then the next, until the entire map is yours. And then what does the opposition do? (See point number two: you can't build outside the fortress zone, so unless you take a city -- and then for how long -- you're essentially stuck). Unless you're just going through a number of completely erratic political moves, like those I experienced, impossible to justify except as a case of guildmaster's hubris or a complete misunderstanding of the political game, the big get bigger and the small rally to their side or get wiped out. This might be so in the real world, and even in laissez-faire capitalism, but in a game, how fun.

4) The economic system is a joke. Had I been allowed to retain the forge, I'm not sure there ever could have been money to be made out of it. People keep their gear anyway and get it fixed on occasion, but they rarely shop around for new items (or at least based on what I have seen). Apart from some limited-use items such as potions or scrolls, I am not sure that a sustainable economy (i.e. one that does not require a massive influx of cash on a regular basis) does exist.

All of this to say that Shadowbane was a complete misfire, with a few interesting concepts buried in the dreck that surrounded it. The class system was good, but some flaws and the nature of the game made sure that only a few types would ever get used. There are many lessons to be learned from Shadowbane's mistakes, and let us hope that forthcoming games such as Age of Conan and (perhaps) Darkfall will have taken note.

coloured · January 2008

some of your comments still have relevance in todays shadowbane, but most of the issues have been ironed out.

classes are mostly balanced and a lot of work has been put into the refinement of this great game.

lets just say there are many reasons why after 3 years I am still playing this game and cant wait to log back in everyday.

btw I have played many other mainstream and mmos and others.

Guitano · January 2008

Originally posted by coloured

some of your comments still have relevance in todays shadowbane, but most of the issues have been ironed out.
classes are mostly balanced and a lot of work has been put into the refinement of this great game.
lets just say there are many reasons why after 3 years I am still playing this game and cant wait to log back in everyday.
btw I have played many other mainstream and mmos and others.

/Agree, alot of the bad things that went wrong in older shadowbane have been fixed for a very long now. I was one of the people that stuck it out though till this day. I have been playing since release and played servers that came and went as the game lost population the dev's let us migrate our toons to other servers. It will be cool to see what the makers of SB are up to in the mmo they are working on atm, hell it might even blow Darkfall out of the water. Without a doubt SB is the most hardcore PvP mmo to date. Many people left SB for one reason or another. I remember when WoW first released the SB population was like 50 people online in prime time. You will not see the massive large scale wars as in the old days. One time my guild had a bane defend, helping our friends guild. We had so many people in the fight on each side that we crashed the servers around 5 or 6 times. Fun times!

coloured · January 2008

Mournings population is still cranking pretty much all day and night.

bloodclan alone fields about 5-7 FG thats about 50-70 ppl... more than enough for an all out war!

Guitano · January 2008

Only bad thing about Shadowbane today is that since the game went free to play, alot of scum have joined up. The community of SB is crap asiade from the vets. Its good to keep global chat off since its loaded with dumb asses that really need a harcore ass beating in real life. Also since the game went free to play the asians infested a few servers making hard for some small guilds to keep going on. Asian gamers are fun to pk since they get their pride hurt even more so than the regular english speaking person. PK an asian player and watch the hate tells roll in from him and all his friends as well in broken english.

judgebeo · January 2008

Originally posted by bortiis

I was just curious. I was never impressed with the screenshots and could never understand why all the game mags were in love with it while in development. Then it comes out and all the bad reviews. Is it true this game really does suck buffalo balls or is it a decent play. plz tell.

The game is a "bit old", so the graphic engine is not like other mmorpg... but it got lot of features that others dont, like lot of races, classes... and, also, an interesting "city" managing.

Dunno if its sucks since it went free cause the "hardcore kids", but when I played it was one of my favourites.

throckmorton · January 2008

Originally posted by Vetarnias
<snip>

Interesting post. I too am a new player to shadowbane, and my first experiences in game were almost identical to you. I was about to quit, until I ran into Dragonscale.

My experience has been different though because I didn't join Divinity, but Dragonscale. It's too bad you ended up with Divinity, because from what I heard Galindar backstabbed us and causes all sorts of problems. The only Divinity member that I remember was goldylocke, he was always helpful to me.

But I think overall-- the fact that terrible things like what happened to you can happen makes playing the game more significant. It's this intensity that allows for great good or great evil. A lot of people will love it. A lot of people will hate it. But it's a refreshing contrast from the mindless drivel of WoW.

I think the game needs to squash all the bugs, fix the lag, stop the exploits and Ubisoft could go back to P2P. It has so much potential, and it's sad to see that after 4 years this game was never really finished.

Vetarnias · January 2008

I couldn't say what Galindar was thinking. He seemed experienced enough a player to know that he could not survive independently in a game like this. Anyway, I haven't logged onto Mourning in a couple of weeks, so I don't know what he is up to these days. Last time I checked, our new guild was still subbed to Dragonscale, so maybe the situation has calmed down.

xholyx · January 2008

I have played a lot of games and I'm just not into the whole pve thing, so, I'll take my fast leveling toons anyday compared to the months other people take in other games trying to get their toons leveled..

So, I'll take the bugs for now until they come up with something better :-P which i doubt cause all the games seem to revolve too much on pve which to me is damn bore :-P or they take way too long to aquire items or just to level..God the leveling....

Over all, this is the best GvG, PvP, game i have played, so i will take the bugs until they come up with something better.

Word of advise to those wanting to join SB don't try to go solo, it's not supposed to be a solo game, It's a team oriented game. Those of you dying all the time and getting tired of it all the time stop trying to be an individual. Find a player friendly nation where you can ask your questions as soon as possible and stay away from the open cities until you have the appropriate skills or what ever.

If you are not too much into pvp then your in the wrong game.

If you like pve better then your in the wrong game.

I do believe they are workling on these issues at the moment and will be wiping all the servers and starting over.

I would probably give this game another try when this happens, until then :-P

logicbomb82 · January 2008

Shadowrun was a good game in the day. It had it's problems like most games but it brought some new ideas to the table and it was geared towards PVP. I love it for about 3-4 months until the bigger guilds stomped all the little guilds to nothing. They need'd some form of balance.

SpookX · January 2008

I am not sure what time you played but 8 of 10 were never deserted. The game has old graphics, most of the "sheep" left because they could not take all the wolves in game. The game still has good population and a huge following for a game of this age. The population will spike again as soon as the server wipes occur. Lots of old guilds returning because there is no other game that provided the pure PvP and GvG on an open map that SB provides. Politics and quality of players determine if that city you spent 3 months building is burnt to the ground or not. If your a graphics farming find the shiny pretty type of player you will hate SB. If you love to test your PvP skill/ charactor building skill against other players every day, every hour you will love it. If they are foolish enough to carry the days goods/gold haul in the pouch and they die you get it all.

If you love to find the Amazing Cheese of the Ages to finish that Sandwich of the Gods quest (PvE or as most call it WoW) dont even give this game a try.

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Alot of Hype about this game that bombed. Is it true it sucked that bad?

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Alot of Hype about this game that bombed. Is it true it sucked that bad?

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV