Another one bites the dust: Shadowbane

korodullin

Shadowbane will be shutting down on May 1st. I believe this is the first 'major' MMO that I've played that's shutting down.

We come to you now with regret and sadness, but also happiness and pride. Regret and sadness that it has finally come to this and as of May 1, 2009 the Shadowbane servers will be powered down once and for all. Yet happiness that it lasted so very long, and pride to be able to stand before such a passionate community to thank you for your undying support and unwavering loyalty to Shadowbane.

Memories of Ages past and present will always remain in the hearts of those who fought for land and title, power and greed, and above all, the sword known as Shadowbane. Tales of epic proportions will be remembered and told for years to come. Allow me to remember the tales past with you one final time.

The Children of Aerynth formed communities, better known as Guilds, to achieve their common goals. These very Guilds built cities beginning with an acorn harvested from the World Tree. The World Tree’s acorns sprouted into stone trees, the Tree of Life, which served as the focal point to all cities within Aerynth. The Tree of Life was most important to these communities as they allowed for a sort of immortality to the spirits of the dead as they were linked to the Tree by powerful magic from which even the Wise couldn’t explain. From these cities raised Empires and Alliances but also brought the strife of war. Many wars would erupt among rival Empires creating fear and chaos across the fragments. Empires sought out the power of the One Sword to either bring Order to the world or to let Chaos reign freely. Humans, Minotaurs, Irekei, Northmen, Dwarves, Centaur Lords, and many other races filled the ranks of these Empires on the battlefields known as Aerynth, Dalgoth, and Vorringia over the Ages. In the distance, you could hear the roars of the fired buildings as they crumbled and collapsed into ashes and rubble, the consistent rhythm of the drums of war as Empire’s marched, and the sounds of gears and pulleys as Siege Engines fire upon resilient and towering walls as the many Empires engaged in battles across the continents vying for power and dominion. Alliances were formed to achieve common goals among various Nations only to be met with strife from within tearing the Alliance apart and pitting Nations against each other once again. Each war created new opportunity to rebuild old Empires once lost and rekindle old friendships or rivalries. New Ages began but the cycle remained the same. The search for the Sword known as Shadowbane continued on.

Epic sieges outside the city gates, Events giving the individual player or entire nations the choice to side with Order or Chaos, and politicking in the political arena to posture for an advantage using the power of the pen instead of the might of the sword are just the beginning of countless memories that we can remember and keep with us for years to come. Adventures through the many Ages have lasted over 6 years for some, while other’s adventures were still a new experience. No matter if you were a seasoned veteran or a fledgling still learning the ropes you poured yourselves into your quests to find Shadowbane. Unfortunately, the Sword has slipped into the Void never to be found again.

Many passionate and creative individuals have poured their hearts and souls into developing and hosting Shadowbane. We want to thank each and every one of you for your tremendous work and valiant efforts throughout Shadowbane’s lifetime.

Remember, Play to Crush!

This actually kind of near and dear to me, since I played Shadowbane for quite a while, both at launch and once it went free-to-play. It was fun for a while, until the crashing errors (sb.exe lawls), rapidly shifting flavor of the month class templates, bug abuses (hi Lords of Death with your nearly un-baneable Tree!), and overly punitive consequences for losing your city making it easier to simply quit rather than rebuild pretty much stopped its growth dead in its tracks about four months into it. It also didn't help that new players to the game, who would party up and go out of the newbie towns at level 20 or so to kill mobs to level, were the prime 'resource' max-level players 'harvested' in order to get gold to keep their cities functional, which pretty much led to those new players not staying past their initial month. The fact that a lot of former Wolfpack devs, including community dude Ashen Temper, are a major part of Star Wars: The Old Republic's dev team, makes me both kind of intrigued and kind of worried.

I guess I have mixed feelings about Shadowbane. There's little love lost between SB and I, but seeing something mostly unique like Shadowbane take the fall while absolute garbage like Horizons is still kicking around is kind of shameful.

Fandyien

Aww, man, thats such a bummer. I really loved that game back in the day - I played it when it first launched on my Macintosh.

It was a great game. I wish it had been a little more polished so it would've been successful.

Jasconius

could this be related to the fact that I do not even know what the hell Shadowbane is?

craptastic marketing imo??

Undead Scottsman

Anyone wanna take bets on what Mondays GU is going to be about?

korodullin

Jasconius wrote: »

could this be related to the fact that I do not even know what the hell Shadowbane is?

craptastic marketing imo??

Shadowbane's also, like, six years old. It had moderate marketing at the time, and a good bit of word-of-mouth, especially with disenfranchised UO PvPers who only had EQ's horrible excuse for PvP to turn to.

Wezoin

Well, I have to say, it was my dream game when it was in development... I intended to pick it up but was only a wee lad and didn't have a credit card, then when it became free I jumped on board. It was really something unique and pretty damn awesome. If you got into a good nation the community was incredible. Some of those people had been playing since launch and played on a daily basis. Its a shame to see it go - just when I was considering jumping back on for a bit. I'll miss ye Shadowbane.

At least Darkfall seems to be shaping up to be similar except much more polished.

Captain Action

Damn.

You know, I used to make fun of the "carebears" until they zerg'ed my clan's city on the war server. It's hard to win battles when 50%+ of the server was in one uber guild.

Nerdtendo

I loved Shadowbane, and only discovered it about two years ago. I wish some WoW servers had the type of hardcore PvP that's present in Shadowbane.

Roxtar

With all of Shadowbanes downfalls (and yes there were many), Shadowbane is pretty much the first PvP MMO that really did it "right" in my opinion... Its unfortunate they didnt make different decisions in its process that could have kept it going however (stability issues, WAYYYYYY more need for PvE content that didnt suck ass).

Zzulu

Buh-bye shadowbane

korodullin

I guess Ubisoft couldn't wait til May 1st to shut down the website, since it's already 404'd.

Kazaka

Salute for the lost.

Had a brief stint with this game 2006~2007. Good times.

Grundlestiltskin

Lords of Death? What server were you on?

korodullin

Death, at launch.

I can't remember if it was Lords of Death or Lords of the Dead, but it was one of those two, and they're pretty much the same style of guild.

Pretty sure it was LoD though.

Grundlestiltskin

I think there was a LoD on my server too, Scorn pre-merge, forget what after.

It was a pretty craptastic game, but it was fun sometimes.

SniperGuy

Oh man, good times with this. Loved being a scout and sneaking around picking off groups when they got in over their heads. So much PvP awesome and fun in that game.

korodullin

Grundlestiltskin wrote: »

I think there was a LoD on my server too, Scorn pre-merge, forget what after.

It was a pretty craptastic game, but it was fun sometimes.

They probably hopped servers a few times, like many uberguilds ended up doing once they "won" the game on their home server and had nobody left to fight.

Wren

starting area was fun. the real world not so much

Ragnar Dragonfyre

Yeah, it's Lords of Death. In every game I encounter them, they're exploiting in some manner. They play to win and have no shame when it comes to cheating.

About Shadowbane though: I can't say that I didn't see this coming. When the game went F2P, that was the first death knell. I played this game in beta and at launch and the sheer lack of anything to do except PvP made the game rather bland. The world was a mostly empty, flat expanse of boring forest. Guilds would quit enmasse after their city was taken while they slept, losing months of work. I played for maybe three months before I became bored and quit.

Shadowbane had many novel ideas, they were just very poorly executed.

Wren

I liked how it rained underwater

Dac

I liked Shadowbane until it turned out that a single, simple raid on a city - not even that many people - chugged the *entire server to the point of unplayability*.

Grundlestiltskin

My favorite part was when, like 6 months-a year after release, Wolfpak was like "oh, we forgot to code the game to actually use your video card. Whoops."

Ragnar Dragonfyre

My favourite part was that I bought a brand new computer to play this game. I was that excited. It still ran like crap.

korodullin

Grundlestiltskin wrote: »

My favorite part was when, like 6 months-a year after release, Wolfpak was like "oh, we forgot to code the game to actually use your video card. Whoops."

Which is funny because it looked pretty bad compared to contemporary games (DAoC) even at release.

xzzy

korodullin wrote: »

Grundlestiltskin wrote: »

My favorite part was when, like 6 months-a year after release, Wolfpak was like "oh, we forgot to code the game to actually use your video card. Whoops."

Which is funny because it looked pretty bad compared to contemporary games (DAoC) even at release.

Even Everquest gave it a run for its money in the graphic department.

Wren

and at least everquest doesn't have bridges unintentionally hovering in the air

korodullin

Ugh. A big wall-of-text comment on Brokentoys made me remember far too many bad things about Shadowbane that I had somehow managed to forget about:

Shadowbane was doomed to fail, and not because of its non-vanillaness. Its fate was sealed before launch by its own developers, and the nails were hammered into its coffin by the live team.

How easily we forget, in our nostalgia, waiting for hours to get into the game because the login servers had the kind of programming error college students make in Network Programming 101. I quit several months after launch, and the problem with people being randomly teleported to 0,0,0 (the bottom of the ocean) where you drowned and lost all your stuff had not been addressed. How hard would it have been to put something there that automatically teleported anyone who arrived there straight to Khar? There was the problem with Trees de-ranking, and the one with buildings vanishing, that they couldn’t fix because they had never written the logging and admin tools to even find out what the problem was. Their was their initial stubborn insistence (finally overcome just before I quit) that they were never going to offer any type of respec; if they changed the way things worked, you could just level up a new character, and of course the first people who leveled up, who had to figure out everything from scratch, deserved to be punished for such audacity with permanently gimped characters (why they thought people who came for hardcore PvP would be eager to spend a couple of weeks grinding a new toon to R6 every time they got nerfed eludes me). We forget the Rolling 30’s finding a godmode switch in the #$@%# client and wreaking havoc with it, and the admins being unable to spot the problem, let alone fix it. We forget their approach to restoring normality — instead of rolling back the server 3 days, just rolling back any toon the player asked for it, so of course everyone gave their stuff to an alt or a friend and got the rollback, for a fine company-sponsored dupe. We forget the incredible cluelessness of a company that completely failed to comprehend that any game needs a supply of new players to replace those lost to attrition and churn… and Shadowbane’s new players never made it to level 21 past the gauntlet of newbie-gankers outside Khar (though there was some amusement to be had in ganking and robbing the newbie-gankers). How long did it take the live team to fix that delightful problem where, if a pet bit a guild city guard, all of the guards in that city promptly proceeded to attack each other in an orgy of slaughter that ended only when every single guard was dead? (usually requiring the city’s owners to be frantically running around killing them as fast as they spawned) There was the scandal about how siege engines were released, and the business of the GM’s giving one faction in a formerly balanced and fun civil war access to an indestructible demon city. Everything the live team touched turned to sludge. Hell, how many times did they change /stuck, never really succeeding in making it useless for exploiting until long after they made it useless for getting unstuck? And this in a game where walking up the stairs in one of the inns on Newbie Island was almost guaranteed to get you extremely stuck, with your body downstairs and your head upstairs. Or the crafting NPCs … no, we don’t play to bake bread, and we also don’t play to spend an hour junking out the stuff people sell to our NPCs. A “junk all” button was just not hardcore enough, I guess. There was their decision to set the cost of repairs exorbitantly high. If you PvP, you are naturally going to get hit, and sometimes going to die, and there was at least a 4:1 ration of PvE:PvP time. That is, of course, leaving out the whole idea of paying for city maintenance. We wanted to Play to Crush, not Pay to Grind. We could have done that in EQ, and baked bread besides.

I said this almost six years ago, on waterthread I think: The real problem with Shadowbane isn’t that it was doomed to fail (and it failed years ago; its body just took a while to realize it was dead). The real problem is that the industry bean-counters were going to (and did) blame its failure on its PvP-centered nature, not on the real reason: a company that thought they could substitute attitude and passion for basic professional competence, and thought that if they just kept telling the players how l33t they were, those players would overlook any and every catastrophic failing of design, implementation, and live management.

In short, they thought PvPers were stupid, and they were very, very wrong. Shadowbane would have failed if it had been the softest and carebear-est PvE. But now “everybody knows” that PvP games don’t sell … thanks to Wolfpack. Thanks to Shadowbane. Thanks for nothing.

xzzy

I remember the fun on Lum's old site, constantly bashing Wolfpack. Those were good days.

Rodent242

Don't play to bake bread!

To be honest I was surprised this game even hit the market at all, from the very get go it seemed to be built to cater for UO griefers and we had all seen the mass exodus from UO to Everquest in no small part because the playerbase wanted to avoid those elements altogether.

And ach. Waterthread. "I have dropped my glass of water on the floor" still brings out the best and worst of me all at once.

GungHo

Was this the game where the GMs would teleport people to hell or the middle of the ocean to die or am I confused?

xzzy

GungHo wrote: »

Was this the game where the GMs would teleport people to hell or the middle of the ocean to die or am I confused?

Well, it was the game where the default teleport location had coordinates 0,0,0, which was under an ocean. So any time you got bugged out you'd find yourself drowning.

darkmayo

I did enjoy this game briefly at the beginning when I rolled with Shadowclan (crazy RPing mofos)

Bigity

Yup, was a good game, if you could get past the bugs and crashes. City battles were how WoW BGs should be.

korodullin

http://www.massively.com/2009/05/02/shadowbane-closure-date-extended-to-july-possible-new-lease-on/

Shadowbane's closing gets pushed back to July; some parties interested in seeing if it can be fixed to make a profit under new ownership.

Madpanda

I remember having a second account for this game which just had a character sitting in one of the main npc cities not in the newbie zone(it was in a desert thats all I remember), who would summon people whenever the portal spell timer was up. The alts name was something like "Summonbot Notellsplz", I made it about 3-4 days after launch and people would constantly hate on me for "ruining the game/immersion/summonbot market"

My main was a templar, before they got good I guess, never got that spell where you grew wings. My roommate played a scout, if i remember right they could run around with speed buff on in stealth, he used this ability to go to high level zones and loot mobs right in front of people. The game was so buggy at the time most people just complained that it was server lag not showing loot.

Tried playing it a year or so ago when I heard it was free, I gave it about 2-3 days, click to move + nobody on the server kinda killed it for me.

Fandyien

I'm really glad to hear it's closing got pushed back. Contrary as it may be to common sense, I'm rooting for this little train that could not of a game.

xzzy

This does seem like the sort of thing that an uberfan could offer Ubi some money for, and actually succeed in purchasing the rights. That's basically what happened with Meridian 59, though the guys who came away with the rights were original developers.

Seems like a huge bargain to me, you get a game that's already been developed, a enthusiastic if small community, and keep a part of MMO history alive.

Maybe a new owner could actually fix some of the issues with the game too.

kharvelan

here's a thought

When MMOs die the creators should release the server software for free on bittorrent so people can make their own home mini servers.

xzzy

Unfortunately, MMOs don't seem to die.

A few of them have gone away (That car one, and Tabula Rasa), but for the most part they stay running far longer than they are "market successes".

Aldo

So wait is this game still functioning or not? I know it's somewhere on my MMO list and I like to run a clean thread. No dead MMOs muddying up the place and stuff...

korodullin

It's still open and functioning until July 1st at least, longer if someone can but it from Ubisoft.