What Does This Post Have To Do With Shadowbane?

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 77 Comments

Sadly, quite a bit.

This entry was posted in Shadowbane, _. Bookmark the permalink.

Belsameth

Never played it but it’s always sad to see an old MMO die.
Facebook User

Damn. I’m sad now. Greatest PvP experience I’ve ever had.
Boanerges

Remember, Play to Crush!

Don’t worry, Blizzard didn’t forget…
Rodalpho

sb.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close
http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

Remember, Play to Crush!
http://emergentfuture.com Arrakiv

Surprised it took that long.

(Not that I’m filled with joy about it, mind you.)
Vetarnias

Is it fair to say that Shadowbane ganked itself out of existence? (Still, six years isn’t bad at all, come to think of it.)

(And what’s the new Broken Toys running gag now? Oh yeah, Darkfall.)
Jeff

I’m sad to see any MMO close down.

I remember playing this game, it was a game that reminded a little too much in the wrong ways of Ultima Online. But there was still some fun to be had.

Sadly my most enduring memory of Shadowbane is walking around in the wilderness without seeing anything for a good half hour. No players, no mobs, no wandering squirrel or deer.
http://azspot.net naum

remember, play to crush!
Raad

WARNING: IMMINENT ANAL-INJECTION OF DARKFALL FANS DETECTED
Freakazoid

Can’t say I’ll miss the game.

Can say I’ll miss the old memes.
Merkwurdigliebe

“…the Shadowbane servers will be powered down once and for all.”

Can I have their stuff?
Fraeg

Hmmmm… some of the most memorable PvP I have ever had was in SB beta, and early release.

Sad to see it go.
Sentack

Pretty sad. I wonder if they might opt to go open source with the game, or because it’s could be sold off to some company, it has to stay locked up just in case an investor might want revive it.

Oh well, it was a neat game, too bad it just didn’t fly that well.
Pentagony

It looks like playin’ to bake bread has won out after all.
hitnrun

I never really got into the actual game, but as a semi-interested member of the game’s forum jockey phalanx a decade ago, this is still a momentous closure for me.

Sad to see it go, even if it was basically stillborn from its troubled development.
http://www.ritchian.com Ritchian

Shadowbane is finally closing down. Its been coming for a while. But it is still a shame.

It should probably also be noted somewhere Ultima Online has somehow managed to outlive yet another MMO.
Mahkno

UO outlives Shadowbane…
Tethyss

I met these folks about 3 GDC’s ago. It just confirmed what I suspected: they were passionate and dedicated, but didn’t really understand PvP and the average player.
http://mikedarga.blogspot.com Mike Darga

RIP Shadowbane.

Anybody know how the SB diehards feel about the current game lineup? I can’t decide if Darkfall or Warhammer seems more likely to receive an influx of players.

Mike
mikedarga.blogspot.com
http://[email protected] JuJutsu

Mike Darga :RIP Shadowbane.
Anybody know how the SB diehards feel about the current game lineup? I can’t decide if Darkfall or Warhammer seems more likely to receive an influx of players.
Mikemikedarga.blogspot.com

Darkfall receiving an influx of players would require the game to be available for sale more than 3 minutes per day.
VPellen

Steve walks warily down the street
With the brim pulled way down low
Ain’t no sound but the sound of his feet
Machine guns ready to go
Are you ready, Are you ready for this
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat
http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

I wasn’t exactly sure how Shadowbane’s “free to play with no micropayments” model was going to do anything but inevitably close.

Unless I’m mistaken about their payment model, the only thing Ubisoft was getting out of it was a bit of publicity for hosting the game, and that wouldn’t last forever.

Apparently Ubisoft couldn’t even wait until May 1st to shut down the official website.
Wanderer

Gonna miss it….

I still have (somewhere) the screenshots I took on my last walk around the world before I quit (before the first server merge). It was heartrending … miles of empty land, with the occasional smoking ruin of an abandoned guild town.

It’s been a long time, but there are things I will always miss about Shadowbane. The music. Flying. Rune runs. Stalking enemy powerleveling groups. Centaurs. A lot of fun with good friends. Character generation and skills. Runes, period. Real PvP. Being able to ninja loot the good stuff from other people’s kills and leave old shoes in its place. Newbie Island, which had the best (and in my time, the only) content in the game. My guild’s Tree sprouting. Some of the art. Feeling like what you did mattered.

I’m not going to miss the exploits, bad design, lag, server crashes, incredibly bad customer service, sb.exe errors, hours of PvE to pay the repairs from minutes of PvP, getting moved to 0,0,0 when you flew over a wall, falling through terrain, more sb.exe errors, getting stuck, idiotic management decisions, zergballs, and most of all, Pay to Crash.
Amp

It’s really too bad only the shitty vanilla coated MMOG’s make money.
Enjoy your wow clones.
Zuzax

Sometimes the play crushes back…
Raad

@Amp
I and millions of others are.
Amaranthar

Amp :
It’s really too bad only the shitty vanilla coated MMOG’s make money.
Enjoy your wow clones.

It wouldn’t have to be that way if only the PvP+loot oriented offerings had some reasonable means to protect against born-to-be-ganked.
Wanderer

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.
Wanderer

s/ration/ratio/
Mark Asher

Shadowbane was a great MMO experience. And for those who think it was the lack of shiny graphics and a more stable engine that doomed it, I suspect it was really just the nature of hardcore PvP. The people who get ganked more often than they gank eventually quit.
wufiavelli

I remember one of the devs said long a go one small thing that might of saved the game would be a annual server reset. (not to mention all the other problems)
http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

Mark Asher :
Shadowbane was a great MMO experience. And for those who think it was the lack of shiny graphics and a more stable engine that doomed it, I suspect it was really just the nature of hardcore PvP. The people who get ganked more often than they gank eventually quit.

The hardcore PvP aspect does alienate its players. However, even moreso than the hardcore PvP aspect, I suspect the main reason Shadowbane didn’t survive was that their server architexture never could successfully support what they wanted to deliver – at least near release, when people were paying attention.

PvP conflicts which escalated to something even remotely epic invariably brought down the whole server. Rollbacks happened constantly, destroying a sense of “accountability” that was so vital to Shadowbane’s design. This is a problem they never got around to solving in time by the time it fell off of most players’ radar (certainly mine). Maybe ever.

They did have some good game mechanics, such excellent character customization (runes being a major part of that) and well-refined play mechanics. However, all this is worthless if the game couldn’t be made stable.

Shadowbane will always have a special place in my heart as the game that used my demo file of the end-of-beta event to generate their release-day screenshots.
Wanderer

Mark Asher :The people who get ganked more often than they gank eventually quit.

Perhaps that’s a fundamental problem with PvP games, then. If it’s a normal distribution, you’ll have a bell curve with most people near the middle gankage-wise, trailing out to the unkillable gankers on one end and the ones who couldn’t gank an afk newbie on the other. If you gradually lose the ones out on the gankee end, the center of the curve will shift ganker-ward as the people who have been semi-competent gankers of the poor PvPers will become gankees of the good ones. Eventually, as attrition nibbles off more and more from the gankee end of the curve over time, you’ll wind up with one guy left, and he’ll quit because he’s bored.

Looking at some other forms of PvP, that doesn’t seem to happen. Consider, say, chess. Yeah, it’s PvP, even though the players aren’t making pictures of centaurs and irekei fall over. International-level chess is positively cutthroat. There are some people who win nearly all the time (and tend to wind up world champions), and some people who lose nearly all the time, and a whole bunch of people in the middle who win some, lose some — but we’re not running out of chess players. There’s a comfortable spot for every chess player. Some play with family and friends. Some play the library or the coffeeshop on the open tables in the park. Some play at their local chess club. Some compete regionally, some nationally, some internationally. In short, there’s a group where everyone can be around the middle of a curve which, I suspect, is more like an hemisphere than a bell. People who win all the time seek more challenging opponents; people who lose all the time find someone closer to their own ability.

With typical MMO PvP, there’s no real equivalent to that. Everyone is in a tournament where they’re likely to face Viswanathan Anand. At least within the same game, there is really no way to find your own niche, where you’re competing against people of your own skill level. (I’m not including artificial environments like WoW’s arenas here; I’m talking about world PvP, Shadowbane style) Plus, there’s something in the gamer mentality that seems to seek domination rather than challenge. Someone like Viswanathan Anand would not want to play an unranked player like me at chess; I’d be about as much of a challenge as a fluffy kitten on the other side of the board, and not as cute. But his PvP equivalent would be more than happy to gank me and dance on my corpse, even though I’m only somewhat more of a challenge in PvP than I am in chess. For the chess player, it’s about finding someone as good or better than he is and outdoing them; for the run-of-the-mill PvPer, it’s about finding someone worse than he is and dominating them. The focus is on the win, not on whether or not it was fun to achieve it.

Personally, I’m weird. I’d rather lose a good, exciting fight that I had just a hair’s chance of winning than I would beat any number of poor slobs who never had a chance against me. If I want something easy, I’ll go slap down Hogger with a fish. But, I’ve learned, my mindset isn’t as common as I wish it was.

So how do we structure a PvP game that doesn’t result in losing all the people who get ganked more than they gank? If I knew that, I’d be running the best MMO in the world, not leaving anonymous comments on Lum’s blog! From what I’ve read, EVE may come the closest anyone has, tying increasing rewards to increasingly dangerous zones. Maybe something like that could be expanded and generalized to other types of MMO’s.

I do know that as long as PvP games (all the way back to early UO) depend on a large supply of victims for a small number of killers to prey on, and there is no corresponding reward for those victims to continue being prey, they’re going to gradually bleed to death. If, as in Shadowbane, they make it nearly impossible for replacements for those players to join the game, they’re going to bleed to death faster. If the game also suffers from catastrophic design, implementation, and management problems, there is nothing in the gaming world that can save it.

Shadowbane promised us “Play to Crush”. We got “Pay to Crash” and “Pay to Grind” and felt like we’d been the victims of bait and switch. We didn’t play Shadowbane to grind levels over and over again just to have a playable character in a slightly different spec. We didn’t play Shadowbane to farm gold to keep our cities standing and our gear from falling apart. We didn’t play Shadowbane to spend hours maintaining our NPC merchants. And we certainly didn’t play Shadowbane to spend an hour or more traveling to a battle (who decided not to put in a /follow command?) only to have the server crash in flames just when things started getting interesting, to spend another hour fighting with the login servers, to and come back to find the enemy city had been completely rolled back and the only evidence that a battle had happened at all was our repair bills, and the need to kill undead for hours more.

I can rant about this for hours. The bottom line is that PvP didn’t kill Shadowbane; it was born with fatal birth defects. On May 1, they’ll take it off life support. But it was doomed to die before it ever went live.
Raad

@Wanderer
Axe meet grind, grind axe.
Mandrik

I can’t think of Shadowbane without thinking of LtM. Then I immediately think of the release of WWIIOL. Then I taxi to victory. *sigh*.
hitnrun

@Wanderer
I obviously had less… invested in Shadowbane than you, because I didn’t even renew my trial account, but I loosely agree with your take. I followed the game’s development religiously for a couple years but it became obvious at release that we’d been had. All the tangential matters mocked by Lummies (ugly graphics, constant delays, complete lack of gameplay progress reports) but considered trivial by Shadowbane fans were, in hindsight, symptoms of Wolfpack “Studios” being a few visionaries and that great writer they picked up off the street presiding over an unmotivated, incompetent, or unfunded dev team.
http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

hitnrun :
@Wanderer[... ]but considered trivial by Shadowbane fans were, in hindsight, symptoms of Wolfpack “Studios” being a few visionaries and that great writer they picked up off the street presiding over an unmotivated, incompetent, or unfunded dev team.

Not so unmotivated as to not take the game back to the drawing board a few times. Not so incompetent or unfunded as to fail to launch the game. Granted, the developers came in and out in waves on this particular project. How many were there that were there in the beginning?

Me, I chalk it up to a failed experiment. One whose very results remain inconclusive as (like most big-budget games) the conclusion was rushed out the door.
http://dsob.wordpress.com/ geldonyetich

Interesting tidbit, a little research into that question of what happened to the original minds behind Shadowbane reveals at the founders of Wolfpack Studios (Josef Hall, Todd Coleman) went on to create King’s Isle Entertainment. They’re behind Wizard 101. They went from Play2Crush to Play2TheTweenMarket. I wonder how much of a jump that was.
Owain

I think the game play on ShadowBane was excellent with respect to PvP, and city building. City sieges were too easy, however, which was a problem, but there was still good game play to be had. ShadowBane’s biggest drawbacks were the terrible bugs that never seem to be fixed, a horrible user interface, and killer lag.

I finally was able to get a copy of DarkFall, and so far I find the game to be very good at the lowbie stage. I like the skill based design, and at least so far, gear doesn’t seem to be quite so dominant a factor in PvP as it is in other games. Gear is easy to get, wears out, and (relatively) easy to replace. I have run into a few jerks, ninja looting is prevalent, but ganking isn’t as much of a problem as I thought it would be, at least in the lowbie areas.

Feedback from guild members who have been in the game longer and are in the midgame relate that Darkfall city combat has some of the best features of Shadowbane sieges, without the severe problems that plagued SB.

Accessibility to buying the game in the first place is DarkFalls biggest problem at this point, but otherwise, the game play seems to be very solid. I suspect that the devs are using this period of time for extended development and testing before releasing the game to a wider audience. This might not be a bad way to go for the long term viability of the game. We’ve seen Alpha releases, and Beta tests are common. Darkfall may be the first game to use a Charlie test phase.

If you can get a copy, Darkfall is turning out to be a very good game. As always, it’s not for everyone, but so far, I think it’s a far better game than any of the recent MMO offerings (Vanguard, Age of Conan, or Warhammer).

For players who favor an open ended sandbox game, with free for all PvP, it’s the ONLY game in town.
http://evilbastages.blogspot.com Grimhawke[EB]

Mike Darga :RIP Shadowbane.
Anybody know how the SB diehards feel about the current game lineup? I can’t decide if Darkfall or Warhammer seems more likely to receive an influx of players.
Mikemikedarga.blogspot.com

Former SB diehard here. Warhammer is a themepark game, and is closer to WoW than SB.

Darkfall, with its FFA PvP, city ownership, siege combat, etc is the new SB. Immediately after the SB announcement our guild, Evil Bastages, started getting more traffic in our forums from former SB players from various sub-guilds of our EB nation that dominated Scorn, Vengeance, etc.

I’d say, barring the difficulty of obtaining a copy of the game, the DF release has been much better than Shadowbane’s. They had a few issues where certain methods of raising certain skills that should have been squelched in Beta were left in for a few weeks on the live EU-1 server. Short term, this gives the players who got accounts in the first two weeks an advantage, but long term things will even out. The game is still in the early stages, high level magic users are still rare and we are only now starting to see naval combat. With a lot of these small issues fixed in recent patches, I do hope that the Adventurine dev team starts taking a closer look at siege mechanics. There were many lessons SB’s devs learned the hard way, and they implemented solutions to combat things like 3 AM sieges, etc.

They also need to go ahead and open up NA-1…

evilbastages.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/people/Daniel-Whitcomb/701502808 Daniel Whitcomb

I really loved the Shadowbane Lore. Shame there wasn’t a game I cared to play that used it. Good luck to the players and devs on finding new opportunities.
Realist

The reason it failed is lack of understanding the difference between “playing to crush” and “playing to grief.” There lots of games that are player vs. player, where the whole point is to crush the opposing player. That includes most strategy games and first-person shooters. The key difference in those games is that you don’t invest a lot time building up capability to enter PvP, and you don’t lose much when you are defeated. In a game like Shadowbane, players can and did lose a lot of time invested. MMOs cost time & money to play. Why would anyone want to pay to play in a MMO where griefing is common and everyone eventually loses? Perhaps more important, what kind of development talent would such a project attract? Devs who really cared about the grief of the players or those who love inflicting it?
Owain

ShadowBane had a small but devoted audience, in spite of it’s shortcomings (as mentioned, bugs, lag, poor interface) precisely because of the challenges offered. Yes, you could and frequently did lose significant virtual assets in terms of the time and energy spent in building a city. One siege, and it all goes up in smoke. People who played ShadowBane did so because this was the case. Shadowbane was not a glorified instance of The Sims Online.

Some people who came to Shadowbane expecting a variant of Everquest left quickly, and that is fine. Such games are not for everyone. There is a market for such games. I think ShadowBane’s problems were mostly technical in nature rather than being a bad game design. Darkfall, from my direct experience now, seems to combine the best parts of Ultima Online at it’s beginning, and ShadowBane. Darkfall is not for everyone either, but I do have to laugh when I read on the DF forums where somebody posts a rant about how he’s quitting Darkfall because someone was mean to him, therefore that must mean DF will inevitably fail.

Games like DarkFall and ShadowBane appeal to some people, but not to others, just like every other segment of the computer game industry. I don’t like sports games, but that doesn’t mean sports games are failures because fewer people play the latest EA NBA Live title than play World of Warcraft.

I don’t understand the sentiment where people root for a game to fail. What does that accomplish? I no longer play WoW, or any other other recent MMO’s that have been released, because those games do not provide what I want in an online game, but I’m not hoping that they fail.

If other games go on to take a healthy share of MMO market, that’s great. People are being entertained, and the game companies are making money, which in turn will encourage further development in all markets. That, in my book, is good. If DarkFall goes on to be a success in the market that it chosen, I think that a lot of people are going to be upset by that, because they are afraid that somewhere, somehow, a ‘griefer’ is having a good time, and God knows, that just isn’t right!

Game bigots. How stupid is that?
Realist

I hope they keep going because it puts all the dysfunctional people in the same virtual environment.
JuJutsu

“Game bigots. How stupid is that?”

“Shadowbane was not a glorified instance of The Sims Online.”

Oh sweet irony.
Owain

“Oh sweet irony.”

No irony involved. There’s nothing wrong with the Sims Online, but it was a bit silly for people to say that an unrestricted PvP game like SB was a bad game because it included unrestricted PvP. The irony lies with players who came into a game like ShadowBane, whose motto was “Play to Crush”, and suddenly they are Shocked, Shocked to discover that unrestricted PvP is taking place there! So what did you expect? The Sims Online? That was the intended point, which JuJutsu, for one, mush have missed.

So, as a public service announcement for those who still may not be sure, DarkFall, like ShadowBane, is not a variant of The Sims Online. There IS unrestricted PvP going on there.

For some folks, it seems the genres are easily confused.
sinij

Owain, I see you are new to this blog. Blaming everything on PvP is what THEY DO around THESE PARTS.
JuJutsu

“That was the intended point, which JuJutsu, for one, mush have missed.”

Yup, that’s not the point that I took at all. I read “…a glorified instance of XXX” as a denigration of XXX whatever it is. If that was not your intention, I’ll take what you say at face value.

If there were players that subscribed to Shadowbane and were shocked that it wasn’t like The Sims Online it must’ve been frustrating to other players. Just out of curiousity, how many instances of that did you run into? I wouldn’t think there would be much carryover from one to the other but I wasn’t there to see. I think it’s pretty easy to distinguish between the genres but that’s just me.
Paks

I really think most people that played SB had a good idea going in that the game was geared towards PvP on the supposed hardcore side. I’m sure there were a few who tried it just to see but I believe that didn’t happen often or at least I didn’t see it much. I mean really all the devs spouted was Play to Crush! so I doubt that could have been misconstrued by a lot of people.

I played the game from early beta till about a year after release and I agree with a lot of what Realist is saying. You literally had to farm for hours on end just to maintain a city, then had to farm for repair costs, to buy new armor, and runes, etc. That was a lot of time spent just farming.

I played on Death for the most part and saw entire guilds drop one after the other when they started losing cities they spent hours farming for by either exploits or fair sieging. It was a disaster, plain and simple. I still don’t know what the devs were thinking. I guess Play to Crush! really meant Play to Grind then lose it all in one fell swoop. That does not equate to fun, and that is one of the main reasons many guilds left. The second reason was bugs and exploits.

SB had some great ideas, but the devs just could not deliver. What they did deliver ruined a lot of the fun the game could have provided to players.

Now Darkfall is plain and simply the joke of the internet. That’s exactly how I feel about it. I’ve never seen a worse more blind community with a dev team (namely Tasos) who’s even worser (hah!) and blinder to the monstrosity he’s built, and I hope I never see the same ever again. Those ships did look cool though. If AV works the bugs out of the game, then good on them, but I wouldn’t touch it with a 20 foot pole.

And since we’re plugging MMOs, mine is Mortal Online (http://www.mortalonline.com/news). The first thing that attracted me to the game was the community. Then I looked at the features and started to drool.

But back on topic. I’m always sorry when a game fails as I know it can’t be an easy thing on a personal level (yeah ok financial to!) for devs and their team. I wish them all well in whatever they do next.

/pours out some hardcore pvp liquor for SB

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