Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

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Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2009 10:32 am

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Fenavian
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This is more for Padishar than anyone else, but Shadowbane is finally closing its doors on July 1st. It's kind of sad really, because of all the MMO's out there, that one really had potential, till they fired all of the Wolfpack team and left it in UBI's hands. One my my friends, Tom, was one of the developers in SB, infact you will see a lot of his work in SB's first expansion. He was dismayed about the whole ordeal, but he has since moved on to bigger and better things. He is currently working on a kid friendly MMO called Wizard 101. I got the opportunity to alpha test for that game, and it was pretty neat.

But back to the SB thing, I have had many hours of enjoyment in that game, so it will be sad to see that one go. It had one of the more deeper character customizations I have ever seen in a given MMO. There was a great story involved there, and the mixing of various classes made things really interesting for that game. Anywho, I jut wanted to give a heads up to those that keep track of those sorts of things.
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Re: Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2009 4:43 pm

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Stracius
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I remember following this game through development and beta, and was pretty excited about it. Yes, it definitely had a very well developed backstory and world, and featured the most diversity I've seen in character development. For some reason I just couldn't stay interested in it enough to last through the trial. This game inspired me to do the most RP'ing I've ever done in an MMO, heh. Good times. Sad to hear its demise.
hoott19 wrote:There are many drinks that are drunk by the people.So, the mostly, person like to have beer. They like because of it's benifit. The benifiti is that it hepls to reduce fat from the body and make the mental calm.
[WoW] This type of games should be up dated as soon as possible. Because there are many people that ere very found of such games. As these are very help full for make the brain power full and strong. So, mentaly strongness is the need of this presant era.

Re: Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

PostPosted: Sat May 23, 2009 6:04 am

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Syro
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Never got into it, but I remember the screeny of the lion with a scorpion tail.

Re: Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

PostPosted: Sun May 24, 2009 5:21 pm

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Futile Resistance
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I remember that minotaur looking thing holding a 2H Sword slowly marching towards the screen.

Must have seen that ad on every gaming site back when it went live.

Re: Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2009 7:51 pm

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Padishar
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Well, that stinks. Here is hoping a SB2 (or clone) is eventually in the works.
Or that someday, some company takes a risk and moves past the dumbed down (but popular console style)
WoW/LotR linear technique of near choiceless char development
and move back to an old school RPG style (where YOU create your char).

Here is what SB brought to the table (Bad then Good):

Da Bad:
Landscape Graphics (they were dated even upon release), although char models were decent;
Buggy code (Crash SB.exe error) because game ran out of money and was released in half finished state (like 99% of all MMO's released too early);
Exploits - Aside from the crash SB.exe error this was the leading cause of people quitting SB, millions of exploits due to messy coding;
Char creation learning curve - The best thing about the game was also a major deterrent for many people (you could nerf yourself picking the wrong choices);
Initial netcode was unable to handle large scale seige wars with 100's of people (eventually was fixed);
VERY limited PVE - the game was made as a monarch style land conquer siege warfare game, to get everyone to max lvl quickly, form guilds, create cities and battle for land/conquest.

Da Good:
12 Races - These determine gender, natural abilities (such as flight), and profession/subprof choices.
4 Base Classes - Fighter, Rogue, Mage, Healer. What only 4?!?!?! Er... this determines which style of a Profession and types of stances & equip you can use.
22 Primary Professions - Its actually well over 30 or so Professions if you consider you pick a Base class first and most Professions support 2 different Base classes (ie. a Rogue Barbarian vs a Fighter Barbarian).
47 Disciplines (subProfessions) - Everyone can have up to 2 sub professions.
200+ Runes (Character Upgrades) - Everyone can up to 12 (I believe its been awhile), Runes are like tattoo's that are burned into your body and they determine everything from your class, and sub professions to personal stat upgrades, permanent buffs, background, traits, etc. Almost all of which are permanent, undispellable and simply a part of your char, being completely independant of lvl, equipment, spells etc. Some are chosen upon char creation others are found out in the world (usually off of a boss).
Stat Monkey Dream: Str, Con, Dex, Int, Spr, AP, DefP, Dodge, Parry, Block, Magic Absorption Shields, Pierce/Slash/Blunt/Fire/Cold/Electric/Mental/Holy/Unholy/Bleed/Poison/Magic damage types, Stance Dancing, Stealth vs Flight vs CC vs Range vs High Def vs Brute Force vs AOE vs Pets, plus rediculous choices of wep/armor/equip choices and combo's on top of all the Prof, SubProf class choices. Stats can only be raised to a certain point b4 you have to use a Rune to get them higher (using up a sacred Rune slot). Skills have "soft" caps, so you can push them ever higher but at a greater and greater cost.
The dev's purposely made it so you can only max out a couple of stats, and there is NO way to get or use all the skills/powers. Which means you could have a dozen people standing side by side, with them all being the same race & class (and though extremely unlikely using the same gear) and not a single one would have the same stats, or skills or powers.
Also with soo many damage types in the game it was impossible not to be weak to something (ie. your kryptonite).
Game cities were guild/player made - Everything from the city you live in to the shops and city walls are all player made and run.
Huge PvP siege battles all battling over land and limited resources, most of this wasn't fleshed out until too late.


Now that the game is massively outdated, it is actually polished and ended up a great game, they need to take what they learned and make a SB2.
The way it is set up now is like this:
Limited land space to place cities. Only one city per territory can be the ruler of that territory.
Rulers of territories, set levies and taxes. So if a "evil" ruler is running the territory your guild city is in, you may be forced to attack them.
Guilds can form nations, with each guild retaining its own name and internal leadership while sporting the nations colors and banner, which then promotes the creation of specialized guilds (some focusing on say Trade or a Thieves guild for instance).
The best items in the game (which are player made) require special resources that are in extreme limited supply, the only way to obtain such resources is to capture certain resource nodes (which are only vulnerable a couple of times a day), leading to MASSIVE server resource battles.
I could go on and on (esp how siege warfare worked), but I think I covered the gist of what I would like to see from the game ported to another game one day.
The game had muuuch potential, but lack of funding and then support is ending a great style of play.

Re: Shadowbane finally gets the Axe... :(

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 8:39 pm

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Kon
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About 2 years ago I tried out Shadowbane for a bit. It did really look like it had potential, but I just couldn't stand the horrendously dated interface and point-and-click movement. I also hope some other MMO with good funding can incorporate some of it's ideas in the future.
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