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Shadowbane: Dev Profile: Sara Jensen
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Sara "Lietgardis" Jensen carries a unique challenge in game development. She is the Lead Designer, not the first, on Shadowbane, an MMORPG that has been on the market for quite a while. Her task is to keep the game fresh, yet still maintain the vision that originally attracted its subscribers. We took the time to discuss this and other challenges in a brief developer profile Q&A.
;) MMORPG.com: As a woman in a leadership role at a game company, you are a rare. Please tell us a bit about the unique challenges you faced getting to the top of an industry often described as male-dominated.
Sara "Lietgardis" Jensen: We're not such a rarity anymore. The Women's Game Conference in Austin has been successful, and Sheri Graner Ray won the Community Contribution Award at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I hear this year's GDC had the highest female attendance ever, and I noticed -- I had to wait in line for the bathroom for the first time! The challenges you sometimes hear about women in the games industry are largely a thing of the past. I highly encourage other women interested in games to look into game development as a career. |
You can read the full profile Q&A here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Congrats to Liet for her outstanding accomplishment!!
/salute
www.wattzbeatz.com/eq2
"They say im different... Well im not the same."
Interesting article. Though, she does say something that's not really true. Shadowbane is not the only PvP game where you're fighting for something that matters. In Lineage II, you're fighting over control of a castle. Control of that castle definitely has benefits to it in that you control aspects of its surrounding territory and those are huge battles that take place during sieges. Aside from sieges, which are scheduled, there's control over areas or valuable resources which is more player driven. If there's a particular spot that's great to harvest a certain material, players will often maintain control of that area and attack anyone who enters it. If you go there and can fend off the defenders, it's yours. Otherwise, you have to go find another spot. So, there's certainly something to gain and lose in L2's PvP.
Another difference about SB, and this is what has kept me from really getting into it is that you have to spend 20 levels grinding through PvE content before you can even experience the PvP portions. Lineage II is open PvP from the moment your character enters the world - for better or worse. There is no starting island.
The first 20 levels in SB is incredibly boring and far from anything that would strike me as "exciting" or "heart-pounding". I'm sure once you've gotten through it once or twice, you devise a pattern and can whip through it in no time, but for someone just starting out, hearing about all this exciting PvP content, then being dropped in the middle of nowhere and having to grind for 20 levels, it's very very boring. I'm sure it's more exciting with more people playing to team up with, etc. But that's not the case as it is now. I've only ever seen one or two other people around at any time I'm on. They should at least spice up the PvE portion, or cut back on the having to travel for such long distances to find the next worthwhile group of mobs to fight. There's way too much land in the starter area for what little content is there.
Oh yeah, and fix the geometry hang-ups. I've had to start over on three different characters because they get stuck in geometry and the /stuck command they have does not work. It moves you away from the geometry, but then the moment you try to move, drags you right back in again. I've waited for over 30 minutes for a GM to come and fix it, and one time they did. But as soon as they did it and I moved.. bam, right back in the geometry again. This happened to me once back when I first tried it - before the first expansion even came out, and it happened to me again when I tried it with the latest expansion. One of the times was in the same exact spot it happened to me the first time. Kinda hard to have faith in the dev. team behind a product when a blatant, game-stopping bug like that has gone unfixed in all this time.
After the third time, I just gave up and quit the game.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
well again i have to say you are wrong, Shadowbane PvP is the best out there! if you do it right you can hit max lvl (75) in 3 days no problem there with a lot of help from the guild
in L2 you have to spend over a month grinding PvE and maybe hit lvl 50, so im sorry to say this m8 but try a little harder next time. for the other info abourt you got PvP from lvl 1 is wrong.
yes you can kill someone but if he dont att. back you become red and everyone can kill you with no penalty and on top of that you got grifers comeing to the noob place killing all lowbies just for the fun of it since they dont know how to kill ppl at there own lvl! Pffff
if you call that pvp then you surely dont know pvp. so come back to SB and give it more then 2 days to hit lvl 20 Pffff try and give it a month maybe?
and if you want to know the first 20 lvls are the hardests since the rest is PL f4twin, so nice try in saying SB aint the best PvP game out there, and nice giving up in testing the game do you also only spend 2 days on a beta game before you say this game suck?
Xanxari out!
You make a lot of good points, WSIMike, but I hope you don't mind if I address them anyhow.
- Shadowbane's PvP has a much greater basis in Player Control than any other MMO currently on the market. Yes, there are other games out there where you're fighting for something that matters but is there any other one out there where you put your gold and time into not only protecting but building and making a flourishing city? A city that you could of helped design, implement, and protect? A city where you can control the vendors or what other NPCs belong there? A city where you can control the guards?
- You are correct, the normal player will go through 20 levels of PvE first. You can actually jump to the mainland at Level 10 (or Level 1 if you are already part of a player guild) but it's not recommended. The reason we do this is we give players a chance to understand the mechanics of the game and their character a little more before sending them into the war torn lands. I like to look at it like going to high school before college... but on a much quicker basis. While 20 levels may sound like a lot, there are players who have easily gotten to Level 20 within a day or two of normal gameplay. Level 20 in Shadowbane is a lot easier to attain than Level 20 in pretty much any other MMO. Like I said, it's a tool for players to learn the game mechanics before having to jump into the real fun.
- There have been some geometry issues in the past. Over the course of the last year or so, we have addressed the vast majority of these, though. This is not a problem just in Shadowbane, I've encountered this problem in pretty much every MMO I've tried. It's a known problem in the industry and everyone is trying their best to alleviate it as best as they can.
With all of that said, I'll be the first to admit that Shadowbane is not a game for every MMO'r out there. In fact, there isn't a game on the market that is. Some of them have gone a long way in attracting a large subscriber base but there has yet to be that "perfect" game that everyone loves to play. Probably never will be (but that won't stop developers from trying, heh). Shadowbane is not a game about questing and, truth be told, that is all that some people like to do (which isn't a bad thing). But in Shadowbane, rather than focusing on the story arc of the single character and taking the game no further, it has extended the experience by creating a backdrop of political intrigue and warfare for players to become engrossed in. Players can join together to form guilds, raise armies and conquer Kingdoms. Leaders marshal their strength to build keeps, temples and fortifications. Armies battle their rivals to control resource mines crucial to their kingdoms' growth. And when diplomacy fails, legions and siege engines batter down the walls of cities, and the destinies of player nations are decided on virtual battlefields.
That is Shadowbane. And if that is something that sounds like you might want to play, you may want to try out the exclusive 20-Day Free Trial on MMORPG.com at:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/news/gameID/16/showArticle/3216
Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg
http://www.seandahlberg.com/
A friend of mine had his level 40ish rogue disappear and when he contacted SB CS he was told that the character had never existed. Did SB ever admit there was a problem with characters disappearing or is it still being met with denials? Do characters still disappear?
Without knowing the exact situation of your friend, it's hard to reply to this. The only issue that existed that I imagine you are talking about is when someone deletes a character and makes a new one with the very same name right away then begins to level him up. If done prior to a proper save, sometimes the new character would revert to the original status (Level 1). With that said, if you would like me to look into the specific issue, you can email me. We do track character data so it should not be hard to see if this character ever existed or not.
Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg
http://www.seandahlberg.com/
Used to be that deleting a character was instant (no "Type YES" confirmation box) so I'm assuming that happened a lot back in the day and the guy just messed up.
Although if it happened after the confirmation box was introduced then I have no idea what it could have been, never heard of anyone's character just "disappearing." (And I've been playing SB since Beta >.<)
------------
Tay - Coming soon to a lore server near you!
Shadowbane -
Carnage
Mourning
Corruption
Entropy
Wrath
Test
Lore server!
The add a link function doesn't seem to like the huge links from a google cached paged so I'll just paste...
And no, he didn't delete his character and make a new one. He just logged on one day and his character was missing.
Shadowbane was a great concept in my opinion, the main issues for me were:
1. I never experienced any great sieges or epic battles, all of the sieges or large confrontations (i.e. 50+ players) I had resulted in lag. On of the funnier moments for me was fighting in a seige where I locked up attacking someone and by the time the lag was over for me I was dead and there was nobody around!
2. While this is a PvP game and I appreciate that, the game itself was not dynamic enough to handle a pure PvP model. What ended up happening was one of a few things: PL (or be PL'd), camp resources (usually PLing while doing so) and the odd siege/raid which was typically driving from some bad experience of the later two. I think merging some quests into this game and providing a more profound PvE model would help greatly (more on that below).
3. Very dated graphics and visual appeal.
4. Transportation was a real pain in the ass.
5. Non-focused PvP does NOT equal focused PvP.
Ok, so what would I recommend to help solve these problems (don't want to make this seem like a rant, imo SB is still one of the premier PvP games out there)?
1. I'd have to see what they are doing in their server side implementation to fix the problem, I get enough of this at work already so we'll just chalk it up to a good old "whatever it takes do it". From what I've seen it looks to me like inefficient packet segmenttion, probably not cutting out irrelevant messages where able, etc... but who knows?
2. There are a number of things that could help here, but in brief I would think that including NPC faction quests and the ability to allow for player driven quests (i.e. guild A creates a contract on person A's head, offering a bounty, guild A creates a contract for X resources, etc...). Another point of interest would be in changing it so NPC's require resources to create items and providing several control points of varying quality to gather them.
3. This is obvious, needs a revamp though depending on implementation that could be as simple as new models/skinning or as bad as SB v2.0 time.
4. Mounts would have been nice, however even fixed point travel in the vein of WoW would be effective here - have several nuetral outposts where you can hitch a ride to some point on the map. The rune travelling business and RFS were really annoying. Though not a related issue, I do believe having more content would help this - that was a huge problem for general gameplay was the sparse and painfully static environment.
5. One thing I used to think was the more "hardcore" the better. I believe many people thing this, but after years of trying different models I have to concede that unfocused PvP is really not good for a game in the long run, in fact not even good for the people engaging in it. Without getting into detail here (I have no problem explaining that point of view more), my feeling is that while the world should be as open as possible and as freeform as possible, sometimes you need guidelines and structure in order to have fun, and if you DO want total PvP, thats fine but there needs to be real consequences here. For example, if you build a city by the amazons to farm, why do they just sit there and do nothing? There should be a Hive AI style implementation where you and your guild gain or lose faction standing with NPC's ... I'd like to see it so that building a city by a site liek that requires a good standing in faction or you will face NPC raids on your town which will get progressively worse as your guild loses faction. Alternately, if a guild wants to become an Amazon guild, and their faction is high enough, they should be able to build within a certain radius of the amazons and have mutual defence pacts, etc.... Without this kind of behaviour the game is 90% ganking (or PLing to be able to gank) and 10% siege/polticing. Other things that would help are FORMAL declarations of alliegence, etc.... so that you cannot attack that faction (directly at least, maybe make assassin/rogues capable of espionage) and have obligations to provide X men or gold or whatever in the event of an allies siege.
Just my thoughts.
Don't waste your time. It is I who had the character lost and no one has ever 1) been able to find any trace of him, and 2) believe me that the character existed even after being sent screenshots of him. One day I log off and go to bed... I come back the next day and he is gone. He was not deleted by me!! I submit bug report, get ignored, repeat and eventually get it escalated to some people that apparently knew the insides of the game. The response I get back is that they aren't convinced me and all of my friends are telling the truth, but out of pure graciousness, they give me 30-days of free bug-ridden play time as compensation. Woohooo!!! Can you sense my overwhelming appreciation?!?!?
I played SB since it went gold. Hell I was one of there advocates so I pretty much know the game inside and out and experienced every possible thing you could do.
Ashen did a hell of a sales pitch but he makes it sound a butt load cooler than it actually is. Frankly I want to play the game he was describing! It sure as heck wasnt what I was paying for with my monthly subscriptions.
Here is reality:
Leveling:
Sure you can get to level 20 in a day but you cant do jack s**T at level 20. At level 20 the only thing to do is get to level 21 without boring yourself to the point where you start contemplating chewing on your keyboard. To be semi effective in pvp you have to be at least level 60. The leveling structure is set up so that it takes a steep upwards curve at Rank 4. Basically leveling gets tougher after level 45 or so. Keep in mind Ashen was right hard in Shadowbane is not comparable to other games. However here is the great trap! Since there is nothing to do but kill each other en mass you are COMPLTELY USELESS TILL LEVEL 60!!!!!!
Yeah thats right completely useless. This means that you level like most large scale SB guilds do. You pl. You find a spot to exploit from and use a macro to afk macro xp. This is how you get to level 75 (the max) in about 3 days. If someone says they did it without macroing they lied no ifs and's or but's about it.
However after level 20 you are kicked off of noob island to one of the freeholds. NPC cities. Where you will "adventure" BAHAHAHAHAHA no you wont. You will find groups to grind with or kick around till you have gotten in guild to get you leveled up in. If you havent gone to the forums and gotten yourself recruited before you leave noob island folks you have sereiously screwed up! What happens at the freeholds? Howver there is hope. There are guilds that are run purely for the enrichment of the guild leader that provide quick and easy groups to level up in. These player run leveling guilds dont have a distinct flavor to them but do fill a purpose. However be prepared the rest of the nations on your server will see you as free meat with the dinner bell ringing!
The griefing asshats spend alot of timing killing poor lowbs out from the freeholds alot. In fact this is a major reason alot of potential SB customers left and one they never really addressed. Heck one prominent SB guild from my old server whos GL was also a class advocate for the game declared that to be recruited you had to kill a certain number of lowbies.
Content:
As I said before the game really starts at level 60. Since the pvp is very template based and has a bit of the old Rock Paper Scissors style stategy left to the game (used to be heavily prevelant but piss poor content developing have virtualy killed this huge strategic aspect of the game off) you have to have a good template design. The developers have improved the ability to alter your character without deleting and rerolling but if you FUBAR your skills get out the reroll and go back to noob island son cause it aint gonna happen!
As far as content when you reach level 60 here it is.
RPKing: You can go around from square island like zones that are filled with mobs while the rest of the terrain is completely devoid of anything to dervive entertainment from. The only thing in this void is player built cities. Once arriving at said zone you kill every mother lovin SOB that you cross or if you have some restraint you follow your kill on sight list and kill till your killed or you run out of pepole to kill. If you have suceeded to the latter you move to the next zone and continue.
Tree Camping: This can be done by picking a random tree or a tree of someone you dislike (trees being the central structure of a town and the respawn point) and killing every citizen in the city you see. Guards have a pathetic AI and are so very underpowered compared to players that they server as little more than alarms with legs! This will usualy lead to some sort of retaliztion against your guild if you are in a guild. If you dont want the retaliation just leave guild there is no penalty what-so-ever.
Mines: Mines produce resoures that are dumped on npc crafts people to complete a static number of predesignated items through a recepie forumula. There is no experimentation. A great many of the items you can make are useless but good gear is essential. Mines can be improved and destroyed and captured. So you spend alot of time fighting people over mines. This was one of the better ideas the developers ever came up with as mines are not as expensive to lose and form a perfect low scale conflict.
Sieging: You can plant a bane hope the guy your fighting selects a time that is decent enough for you to attend and then go have a war over the city. The goal of which is to destroy the Tree at the center of the city. Cities are not really customizeable at all in SB. There are a few basic wall designs that you can learn turing your server for about an hour and bam thats it!!!!!
PVE: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA the mobs in SB might as well be graphics of money bags floating through the air. There is no pve in this game. Mobs are merely a means to gain levels and gold. Since however a mine can produce 20mill per week when fully ranked they are a last resort means of getting gold. Especially since the developers in the implementation of the Crafting system destroyed players ability to sell back loot and turn a profit with cities/npc's.
Note none of what I said except the pve can be done really effectively below level 60. So your stuck afk grinding xp! BTW most people do this and it is against the user agreement but the enforcement of this rule is a pathetic joke. If the CCR doesnt like you your busted for it if they dont know you they dont care! If they like you they are taching you exploits in the game! Welcome to SB baby!
Biggest issues with Shadowbane:
Cons:
1) Pathetic and unprofessional Customer Service. They lie left and right enforce the code when they choose and to whom they choose and will refuse to help at times with even some of the most basic requests. Futhermore UBI/WP does not really hold them to any sort of responsible standard.
2) Content additions. In a competitive game a balance has to be struck especially in a template based pvp game. However the developers have shown for 2 years that they have zero clue in how to achieve that balance and also have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do not have a basic idea, concept, and role for each class in the game.
Here is the secret jump in whatever overpowered latests release race there is and kick some but. They usualy come out so grossly overpowered it turns the entire server into that particular race in about 3 days.
3) This game is hell on new people. If you know someone trying this game out for the first time light a candle for them cause they are going to need it. It has been known for a great deal of time by many of the players in the SB community that the reason new subscribership is almost nill and none is because the game ripps new players apart.
4) LAG LAG LAG LAG LAG! They have been trying to fix the lag for two years. Servers have dropped from 10 servers to 3 servers and prime timpe server populations have gone from the Thousands to perhaps 200 yet there is still lag!!!!!!!!!!! Every patch lists "serve optimization" but nothing really improves. When a new patch comes out expect your server to crash its SOP for 2 years now! The good thing about it after the crash they will double the XP rate for a period of time. This is an idea that has been suggested by players for 2 years as a permanent solution for a lack of in-game things to do from levels 1-59. Dev team says.........(crickets)...........
5) No real consistent feature events. SB fired there featured events team back in the day so epic battles vs gods dont happen anymore. There is no story development and one of the best PC game fictions ever written litteraly languishes in a closet somehwere. It is true that occaisionaly a feature event will happen to promote an x-pac or something but nothing to follow a story arc.
6) The kingdom system that Ashen aludes to is broken. There are so very few bennefits from owning a province or kingdom and so many loop holes to avoid those few benefits that it is really just a status symbol. Nothing more!
7) The Memory leak. This game has a memory leak from hell. It chews up your ram like a pit bull in a pile of pork chops. Your playing a game with 3rd rate graphics and its using 900k of ram! W...T...F! To compound this the game makes almost no use of your graphics card at all so its basically entirely in your system memory. JOY!
Pros:
1) Freedom! What there is to do in SB you can do it whenever and wherever you want. The game contains none of the constant funneling and player controls present in other MMO's.
2) Sieging: Every now and again you get a truly epic battle. These things linger in the memory of the communites and even have names! Truly top notch.
3) Best End game in a MMO ever conceptualized. Indefintly sustainable and entertaining but very poorly implemented.
All in all this game is maybe worth about $9.99 per month. New content is few and far between and that is really what we as MMO players are paying that montly subscription for! They tinker with a few mob zones (PVE SUCKS IN THIS GAME) and attempt some balancing. However adding in new architecture, new siege weapons, or new concept ideas like an outpost really does not happen regularly.
Having a great end game the honest trugh about SB is that it has no beginning game! I think i have made that point abundently clear this is why it is so hard for a new player to get into the game.
All in all while some good concepts the gross ineptness of the implementation have done immense damage to those concepts and we as a gaming communtiy are less likely to see those concepts out there again on the market in some form because of it. I dont pay to play this game and probably kept going for a few months at the end because I had a free subscription. However I would not recomend anyone here pay to play this game until we read an article about real change at the core level of Shadowbane and less posts like Ashen where there is a alot of smoke being blown up alot of butts but little real information!
Nice little story there Azash_AT Dont completely agree with ye but atleast you spend time thinking some of it throu.
Things i dont agree with:
Lag: Lag have propperly been one of the major problems SB have always battled with. Allthou it dosint seem to be a problem anymore. Dno why.. But the shit stopped lagging.
Kingdoms: Broken.. Not really there are ways you can limit your loss to beeing under a ruling guild but no real way to completely escape the taxation.
Sieges: Are you shitting me ? Last 1 hour.. Dude you must be drunk. And as for 1 wall desing. Seriusly dude.. Sieges can last anywhere from 15min to 5 hours or more. It all depends on on the guild/nations involved.
LVLing / new players: well considering the fact that while i was on vacation 3 of my RL freinds startet playing SB and had made 2xr7 toon and gotten a guild in less than 2 weeks. So all in all SB isint worse than any other MMO outthere. Unless you wanna say that beeing able to test and make new toons fast and easy is a bad thing.
Thats about it.. Rest i more or les agree with.
Thawnie NordicChapter.
Active NL on redemption.
Played SB sins 3 months before release. (was in beta)