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What doomed this game?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
in Shadowbane
what put a end to this game?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
1. Bugs and it's unplayability at launch. People who had Windows ME/2000 had to step down to 98.
2. The unforgiving penalty of having your city burn down at 4 am in the morning losing all your high tier merchants and trainers, while your guildmates were asleep.
The harsh nature of losing all you worked for was too much for the community that the majority started quitting enmass. The solution ? Server resets and going F2P. Unfortunally it didn't save the game which was a great idea but couldn't be executed successfully
I disagree with this. I played through the Throne of Oblivion beta. ToO was just too stupid. At the same time that the ToO beta was taking place, there was another game in beta... WoW.
Within about 2.5 months, WoW had more subs than EQ ever had at peak.
WoW stripped players from many games.
The people I played SB with left for WoW (mainly) and EVE because of disappointment with ToO.
That was the en masse departure, led to server merges, etc, etc.
Funny how the game bumbled along for years after...
#1 would have been at launch, which would not have killed the game.
#2 is basically false since the time on the bane was not set by the attacker.
One could always joke that what killed SB was going from P2P to F2P, eh? Cause in the end...well yeah, anyway...
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
I'd say this is almost spot on. What I'd add to the second point is that the penalty was considerd harsh in comparison to what it took to build a city. If building a city and razing it to the ground took similar time and effort then the SB crowd would have accepted it. SB players never really expressed a problem with loss, rather the inordinate disparity between rate of loss and rate of gain when it comes to cities.
The other poster's thing about WOW is immaterial. WOW catered to a different audience, and SB was designed for as low as a 50k+ audience.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
1. Anticipation of the game. The 300k players that bought the game on launch day expected the next best thing. They were disappointed.
2. Technology. They developers were trying to make something well ahead of its time. They almost succeeded. Its the first game every to have over 1000 players fighting at one city without a total lock up or lag out (server did crash on a couple of banes, but some actually went from start to end with thousands of players trying to kill each other). However the game looked bland, used OpenGL instead of DirectX and was run on specialized server hardware that became obsolete within the first year of the game. Also the programmers were disdained players from Ultama Online, players don't always have the greatest programming skills. Some of the developers admitted they learned how to program while making Shadowbane. Imagine that.
3. UBIsoft buyout and ToO. ToO really pissed off enough hardcore Shadowbane players that it can be said it was a factor of the a major decline in population. UBIsoft put a new agenda into the ex-wolfpack developer's (that didn't quit) that pushed some of their dedication away from the game (the MMO they were buidling using the Unreal engine).
4. UBIsoft closing the game and making it vanish, not wanting to be affiliated with Shadowbane at all. Won't sell the IP. Has buried it forever. Good thing some players have not allowed it to die completely. Things tend to rise from the grave every now and then, and its not going to be on crappy servers either this time (maybe crappy ISP's, if its on someones cable connection lol).
Shadowbane had an amazing idea but that idea died when they screwed up the program. Someone needs to take Darkfall's engine and mold it to Shadowbane mechanics. Then you will see a WoW killer!!! (or not, but it would be awesome!!!)
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
The fact that Ubi soft published shadowbane is the day SB was doomed.
What if darkfall got published by ubi soft? Darkfall would had been vanished too before DF 1st expansion.
C:\Users\FF\Desktop\spin move.gif
I loved SB, personally. But it's demise wasn't speedy, and it wasn't a "doomed" game. There were just certain things that consumers didn't care for. City destruction/construction was always a huge complaint, which could have easily been fixed. The releases of first CoH, then WoW, SWG, and EVE didn't help matters.
I love the concept behind it, and hope that some day another MMO will come along with siege mechanics that don't fail. But until then, I'll just patiently await the arrival of TOR.
THE Rooster Nash
I wish a dev would pick up the game and release a shadowbane 2 like guild wars is getting a v2.0. The depth of class creation in shadowbane was really unmatched to anything i have seen since and that is what made pvp so much fun. You never knew what you were up against untill you got into the battle. You see a warrior but they could be 1 of 10 dif totally viable builds, same with all the other classes. I still remember how much fun it was being in groups constantly checking tracking for pkers or theives... that was good times.
There is a community driven shadowbane server emulator project, which looks like it just went live with a preview this month.
http://www.playtocrush.com/forums/
Basically, if you have the client, you can play the game on their server for free. I don't know what the completed feature set is or anything, but they had lots of exclamation points in the post on the preview being live.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I remember at launch, you had to restart your client every 2-3 hours due to memory leaks crippling your computer. Clients had a hard time dealing with raids, which resulted into players abusing it; On defense, all you had to do is to get as many players as possible in one stack so it would cause whoever approaches this area to freeze/crash and to become sitting ducks.
And once upon a time, a 'GM Event' provided an invicible city and limitless sources of gold to our nemesis next to our capital city. The GM also spawned enemy trebuchets in the heart of our cities as he pleased. Few days later all our cities felt and most of our alliance quit the game.
Nevertheless, the game was fun, didn't really have any PVE and unforgiving for soloers. Unless you wanted to gank newbies.
I remember years ago my wife purchased a retail copy of the game for me as a Christmas gift. At that time I had never heard of the game but was intrigued since it was a MMO. Upon doing research I had read that the game was overcharging people's credit cards and sometimes even charging when they weren't suppose to. On top of that, trying to contact BIO or whoever to get their money back was almost impossible.
At that point I told my wife to return the unopened game.
bugs, mediocre pve game, bad interface, great class build diversification (more than rift) but could also leave you very gimped if not planned well. if this game was remade with today's technology, i think it would do much better. Building your own city was fantastic, as well as the politics that came with it. but they did a poor job on a lot of the great ideas they tried to implement. The pvp was too harsh for a lot of people as well, and there wasn't any other premise to the game.
I recall this was this was the main complaint that you had to farm gold to repair your city for the guilds. Not much fun grinding everyday for gold from the moment you log on and the bugs did not help. I betaed it but did not buy it ,I felt it was too unforgiving and harsh.
Most of the post i have read are listing things that were worked out in time. The map looked like a random gorup of guild cities but there was map was anything but random. Mines took care if some of the city cost, that was added after you stoped playing im sure.
It was a fantastic game, very hard at times but I always enjoyed it.
I use to play on the War server at release. Death's Head Legion was the Empire and everyone else either got the hell out of their way by paying tribute or fought back (usually getting crushed). As appealing as it was to join the dark side I decided to join a Northmen guild, based on the Ice Continent where the Empire had little control. From there we aligned with other guilds opposed to the Empire and had some great fights. Waging wars, talking politics, and random raids made the game well ahead of its time and way more hardcore than most could handle. It was a frustrating experience but the rewards were there. An individual kill felt good, winning a battle felt better, destroying an enemy city felt amazing.
Unfortunately, for all the good Shadowbane had, it didn't have the right engine or coding or programming. I remember one server was hacked into. Amusing as it was to see that hundreds of people had been transported to a place called Green Acres under the ocean and insta-killed, it probably wasn't fun for those who were. Too bad.
From there I wandered from MMO to MMO hoping for something similar. SWG didn't do it for me. WoW certainly didn't. Lineage 2 didn't help. Fallen Earth came close, but, no, it didn't satisfy either.
Eventually I went back to Shadowbane F2P, enjoyed it for a while but the magic was gone. Sucked out by the dated game mechanics, low population, and... the hordes of Chinese players that literrally 300-400 man zerg the English speaking guilds into submission.
Shadowbane wasn't doomed by friendlier MMOs or popular titles. Shadowbane has its niche of gamers that enjoy PvP more than PvE, that enjoy the sandbox feel of Shadowbane than the linear paths of other MMOs. That is evident, people are still trying to keep it going. Shadowbane was doomed because it was poorly executed from the start.
I think, and I hope, that if Shadowbane 2 or a game as sandbox and hardcore as Shadowbane was, came out properly executed it would muster a dedicated core of gamers. It wouldn't top any popularity lists by any means, but it wouldn't die the slow painful death Shadowbane did.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard or seen anything like a Shadowbane 2.
I too played on War and started in DHL, then later joined Fallen Angels to terrorize them and Blood and Iron :P
Shadowbane had its problems, but despite them all, it was still the best game I've ever played.
The bugs eventually just became part of the game and you got use to them.
It was the ultimate game because it made you man up to every challenge it presented to you.
If you got owned, it encouraged you to look at a better build. If you got zerged, it encouraged you to get more friends. It wasn't a game for whiners.
It was very "life-like" in that respect. Yes it was unforgiving, and it took a large commitment to build a city, but that was the point.
City building wasn't for everyone. I myself never placed a single building in the game, not because I didn't want to, but because I understood my role in the game and that that duty was for the leaders in my guilds.
But that was its beauty, you could be anything you wanted to be in the game.. and if you had the desire to lead a guild and build an empire.. you also needed a toolbox full of rare skills or you would be crushed.
Empires required commitments from many people to flourish.
In retrospect I think a better mechanic for sieges would have been to only allow the Tree of Life to de-rank one level per bane so your entire city wouldn't be gone in the morning if lost.
A couple of key features that I just loved in Shadowbane that I've never seen before in any other game:
1) Tracking. I had so much fun with this. A scout was my first toon and it was so rewarding to know that I was the eyes and ears of my army. It rewarded cleverness and tactics in a way that no other game has been able to touch on.
2) Infinite builds. No other game I've played has come close to reaching the level of customization shadowbane allowed you to have. The leveling pace for this mechanic was also perfect. Not too slow that it would take a month to make a new toon. Not too fast that you didn't feel a sense of love and loyalty to your toons if they became obsolete.
I would love to see these ideas come back in some of these more modern games.
Hmm could this be done?
This game was amazing and should be remade with better graphics/programming. Everything else should stay the same.
People ho complain about games now being on rails and too easy / carebear / wow clones.. Well this was the game that I wish had gotten the backing and support that Wow did..
Open PvP, city building, sandbox as you can get. Large scale sieges and wars.. If you had a guild leader who was good at the politics you had allot of fun.
What finally killed it for me and my guild was that after the server war it seemed like there was nothing left. The alliance had chased off the mega guild and had taken control of the server. And that is the problem with a truly sandbox game. Once the users are tired of the content they have created for themselves there is really nothing left to do..
I never quite took a liking to the way you navigated your character in the world. It seemed very behind its time in that regard.
Reading up about the game now, and I am so very sad I never got to experience this game. Well thats not entirely true, I do remember trying it in 2009 or 2008, but I remember extremly little of it. Seems like such a good theme, so many skills, classes, and races, like a somewhat new mmorpg with the incredible depth of older mmorpgs
pgs. And we will never see anything like this or istaria ever again. Makes me want to build a time machine.
what doomed this game?
in one word UBIsoft nuff said..
no need to blame it on buggs or old grafix there are plenty of games out there now that you can still play " not to mention PAY "
that has / had the same problems..people that complained / whined about this are the same people that should hadnt even been playing in the 1st place..it was a old mmo that UBIsoft negleted and that could still be makeing money and could be going now if they had any direction imo
people forget it was totally FREE! with no cashshops no silly mounts to pay for nuttin / nadda but in the long run i belive it was costing dumbarse UBIsoft more money to keep open and not makeing a penny off of it
byfar the best open pvp mmo i had ever played in my life!