Shadowbane - now a FREE mmorpg

Post by **Nadia** » Sat Jan 25, 2003 12:54 am

game site
http://chronicle.ubi.com/index.php

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?setV ... 0323114224

Many members of the Shadowbane Community have already noticed that a change has occured to the Billing System today; one that allows players to play for free!

There will be a more in-depth announcement coming soon but, in the meanwhile, I wanted to let our community know that this is not an error. Existing users can now open up their Account Manager and their accounts will now be working, allowing them to play Shadowbane for free! This does include those who had previously canceled accounts!

In addition, those who wish to try out Shadowbane for the first time will also be able to. All you have to do is create a new ubi.com account and then click on Add a Subscription, and you will have free access to the lands of Aerynth! This is not a Free-Trial subscription and it will not run out in 15-days. This is completely free!

Post by **Nadia** » Mon Jan 27, 2003 5:50 am

3000 Beta Testers Join Shadowbane
http://gamerifts.com/#newsitem1043366400,19303,
Unofficial word has been released that 3000 new beta testers are being added today for Shadowbane's closed beta test. This by far is the largest addition to the closed Shadowbane test to date. Checking the official website for news, which has not been announced we tracked down Chris “Vosx” Mancil for the word which was confirmed!

"We want this next wave to come in and break Shadowbane. We need them to tear it apart, so we can put it all back together - and then we will do it again."

Louis Lamarche, Assistant Producer Shadowbane

Xtizu · Post by **Xtizu** » Fri Feb 07, 2003 2:54 am

i have the pre-order

minotaurage here i come!

Khendon Kheldorn · Post by **Khendon Kheldorn** » Thu Feb 13, 2003 7:37 pm

I've got 3 preorder boxes here, one for me, one for my gaming friend, and one utility account.

I can't wait for it to go gold, just hoping it doesn't turn into griefer hell.

Klast Brell · Post by **Klast Brell** » Fri Feb 14, 2003 6:55 am

That's my weddiding day.

Soulforger · Post by **Soulforger** » Mon Feb 17, 2003 9:41 pm

Finally!

Minute · Post by **Minute** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 12:02 am

I'm gonna be a Templar!

xooey · Post by **xooey** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 11:46 am

game looks really nice, gonna get alot of ultima players i bet, teh map is great, shows npc's really has some potential

Edyil Crossfire · Post by **Edyil Crossfire** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 1:34 pm

Im looking forward to trying it out.

Should be fun.

Khendon Kheldorn · Post by **Khendon Kheldorn** » Fri Mar 21, 2003 12:54 pm

4 days and drooling.. er, counting.

Robyn the Ranger · Post by **Robyn the Ranger** » Sun Mar 23, 2003 5:33 pm

what is it? like EQ? DAoC? MMORPG i'm assuming.. is it pay to play too?

Khendon Kheldorn · Post by **Khendon Kheldorn** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 8:49 am

what is it? like EQ? DAoC? MMORPG i'm assuming.. is it pay to play too?

Well, it's more like EQ2 may be, if it ever shows up, but a totally different enviornment. For one thing, there are no 'zones' per se, the closest thing to 'zoneing' would be moving across server lines. Sort of zoning from Brell to Xev, for example.

The world is fully PvP enabled, after you hit 20th level, but, at least in beta, this isn't anything like the Sullen or old UO pvp was. For one thing, you have to be a member of some guild, either player run, or NPC/Class. The PvP combat aspect is more geared towards taking control of other player run towns than anything else.

PC built towns and cities are very important in Shadowbane, and fairly expensive. They give the advantage though that the PC's control the economy, and can set up shops with NPC tradesmen that take raw materials, and over time, craft desired goods; either for use by the town-guild members, or for general sale.

The world is very large, and the graphics are at least as good as Luclin in EQ. There are Levels, but very different from EQ, in that exp gain/loss depends on the level difference between the combatants. IE: You at level 10, kill a level 20 mob, you get huge xp. Level 20 mob kills you, you lose a little xp. Level 1 mob kills you, you lose huge xp.

Character classing and sub-classing is well done, and provides for a lot of divergance in the player base. Massive balancing and tweaking were done in beta, so it shouldn't be too unbalanced when it first comes out.

The economy seems to be well designed, with a large amount of cash sinks, which for the most part are required in order to advance. 90% of all item trading is done between players, very little is between PC and NPC. You can't loot an item, and sell it to an NPC for cash for example. Time will tell if this virtual economy will be self-sustaining, or will fail as the economies of UO, EQ, AC, DAoC et al have.

The races are interesting, and there is a lot of backstory and lore about each. (Damnit, I can't play an Aracroix bard though /pout).

Yes, there is a monthly fee to play, about $10/month.

The link to http://www.shadowbane.com is the overview, but for details (and some great screenies from the close of beta event), go here:
http://chronicle.ubi.com/

I'll be there,

[/url]

Robyn the Ranger · Post by **Robyn the Ranger** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 12:46 pm

while it sounds like a cool game, i ain't payin every month for another game.. fuck that, lol

Post by **Nadia** » Wed Mar 26, 2003 10:04 am

long gamer review
http://forums.warcry.com/read.php?f=1&i ... 285#121285

Things to take into account when reading this post:

-- I have not played SB on a "gaming rig". My computer is a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 7935. [1.3ghz Athlon, 384SDRAM, Windows XP, and best of all, the amazing TNT2 M64 video card.] Because of my rural living area I am on a 56k modem (which never connects at higher than 46.6kbps).

-- My previous MMO experience is really only EQ. Also on a sub-par computer, I played it for a few years. Lead a few raids and such. Quit before Luclin. So in other words: coming into SB I was a gank squad virgin, a major carebear. Aside from playing a few games of Starcraft and online checkers my game playing was 100% PVP-.

-- My only previous beta experience is about as far from SB as you can be... Toontown!

From such a foreword as this, one would predict that I would have a horrible, awful, atrocious, and no doubt traumatizing time being a beta tester for Shadowbane. But read on, and you'll be surprised.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have been following SB for a while. I guess maybe three years or so. I probably started checking it out right after I quit EverQuest. In any case, I put myself on the beta sign up a few times over the years. I finally got in around the end of February I guess. They added ten thousand new testers and I was one of the lucky ones to have my name drawn. I had my friend with DSL coverage download and burn the game for me [in exchange for a micky of Fireball whisky] and eagerly installed the beta the day after I got the acceptance email.

Downloading the patch was far more painless than I expected. Unlike others I have NEVER run into large-scale bottlenecks with the SB patch server. And even on my 56k I was patched up quite quickly. This, prior to installation of the game, was one of my greatest worries. Suffice to say if I had to leave my comp online all night to patch a game, that game would not be played.

[A note about myself: I am an information sponge. Something about my brain just works really well in regards to video gaming trivia. In EQ I knew literally everything. Drops, zones, spells, skills, yadda-yadda. And the same is still true of SB. I went into the game knowing a whole lot about what was right and wrong to do, character and set-up wise, from reading the beta boards.]

I'm not going to really go over character creation. It is a simple process and it is pretty bloody hard to gimp a character at level 1. And no matter what, you will re-roll your first 5 or so characters just because you want to do something different and you realize new possibilities.

After making your character, you pick a town to start in. As a newbie there seems like a lot to choose from but it really isn't that big a deal. The newbie island, Tyrranth Minor, consists of three general areas. These are Knightsbridge, Swampstone, and Silverlance. These form a rough triangle with KB being westmost, SS northmost, and SL the eastmost areas of newbie isle.

Knightsbridge and Silverlance are essentially mirror images of one another for the first 10 levels. And no one starts at Swampstone because it is a rather hideous, SWAMPY place that is hard to navigate. For the first 10 levels one cannot bind oneself to the cities themselves, but only to the hamlets that surround them and make up the newbie area. I recommend starting in the hamlets around Silverlance. [But really only out of habit, it comes down to personal preference.]

After picking a starting area, you are pretty much thrown off a boat and told to swim for shore. I expect things will be a bit easier with the aid of a manual (one would hope so in any case), but during beta a lot of people got lost and perhaps even turned off the game for good at this point.

The starting UI does indeed suck. You can definitely play with it for a while and not suffer any major drawbacks; it just makes it harder to manage a lot of small tasks. The UI is massively customizable though, and after a few characters you kind of pick something you like and stick with that.

Pathfinding is not on by default. You have to use the command “/path on” to smarten your character up. A whole lot of frustration is because people don’t know about this. I expect Wolfpack is going to make it on by default and add a toggle under the options menu.

On my computer I turned down most settings. This is understandable considering my computer’s stats. Shadows were very nice but dropped frame rates. The game is quite stable, though there was a memory leak that slowly gobbled ram and may still be around as of the version (1.0.0) they burned onto CDs to ship. Really I could play for 6 hours at a time without a crash, and did so often, even before the release version. [The game is apparently FUBAR for all users of Win98/ME but I really don’t have much in the way of pity for them… Look at me on my gimpy HP machine, I don’t have a 5 year old OS. But that’s really a topic for another thread.]

Tip for the beginner SB player: sheathing and unsheathing swords seems like an amazingly complicated thing to do at first, but becomes second nature after a while. You need to have your weapon unsheathed to be able to initiate combat with something. Quick way people do this later in the game:

1. Stand up (“Z”, I tend to just skip to step 3 where it does it automatically)
2. Hit “C” to unsheathe weapon.
3. Hit “Home” a few times to cycle through the list of NPC targets
4. Hit “CTRL-A” to run to your target and start swinging.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you need to rest, and sit again.

One also must have their weapon sheathed to open dialogue with a non combat NPC such as a vendor.

SB has many “foibles” similar to that one. These trip up a lot of new players. Really Wolfpack just needs to streamline a few small things, and the game will be a lot easier to get into. They obviously should have done this previously, but as long as they do it in a reasonable amount of time I will be happy.

Groups can buzz saw through mobs amazingly fast thanks to such easy targeting and not actually having to use the mouse to do anything. This does, however, cause complacency. A mid level group (off Tyrranth Minor) is easy prey for higher-level gankers because the routine winds down to those 5 steps above. Once you experience a bit of PVP yourself though, a certain level of heightened awareness sets in and you watch your back a lot better.

Newbie isle is completely PVP free. From levels 1-20 all you will be doing is grouping with people and whacking moles just like every other game. But this is actually nice considering the fairly rough learning curve of Shadowbane. And it lets you level your character without worrying about someone stealing the gold you use to train.

There are issues with newbie isle though. Because of mechanics, it is possible to profit from another player’s death in some ways. You can loot anyone’s corpse in Shadowbane, and they haven’t yet made it impossible to do so on Tyrranth Minor. I honestly expect this to be changed in the future. Until then, it gives people the hard lesson to bank their gold and items often.

The first few characters I played, it seemed like I would never escape the monotonous mole whacking of newbie isle to reach the true glory of Shadowbane. But with a bit of practice and knowledge, and a decent amount of luck, you can get from 1-10 in 2 hours, and 10-25 in another 6. Really it all depends on who you group with and where you go and how often you die.

New changes have made it so that you are forced off of newbie isle by level 25. My apologies if the exact level is incorrect. In any case, you are booted out of the cradle and into the real world.

You now have three new choices of where to go. The most popular being King’s Cross, the second most being the sandy Khar Th’Sekt, and the least crowded being the snowy Vorringard. Thanks to Shadowbane’s Tree of Life system, which allows you to warp instantly from one ToL to another, it doesn’t matter which you pick. And I recommend traveling between the three to get your bearings on each area. You don’t have to engage in PVP immediately, nor will most people. At first it is really the same deal as Tyrranth Minor: whack a mole. The chance of PVP just adds a lot of spice to the old recipe.

As I mentioned in the foreword of this post, I started out as a complete “carebear”. Thus, my first experiences in Shadowbane PVP were indeed rather traumatizing. Sweaty armpits, pounding heart, shaking hands, and a good dose of adrenaline. I died often to a certain griefer. [Thanks to recent patches, that griefer, by today’s standards, could easily be killed with a little bit of skill and teamwork.] I had one night, where amplified by having a terrible cold and fever, I had a horrible, horrible time playing SB. I thought, “if this is the effect this game is having on me then I shouldn’t play it” and considered deleting the beta. Then I decided to just chill out, watch some TV, and go to bed.

The next day there was a character wipe for the release patch, Shadowbane version 1.0.0. The next character I created, I leveled amazingly fast. Among the droves of new newbies. I got up to level 25, trained up some PVP skills, and with all those same “carebear’s first time” symptoms of pounding heart, sweaty pits, and shaky hands, I became the aggressor.

Now at level 25 there is not much you can do alone in PVP. I didn’t even seek out single people to try to kill them; hell I didn’t try to kill anyone. I just played Thief. I snuck up to large parties of hunters, picked their pockets, and hid again. Because of my low level I could only steal a few hundred gold at a time from these people but I was really just doing it as practice. One time I accidentally double clicked the leader of this full (10 people) group, and my character stepped out of invisibility and started swinging his puny daggers at the guy (an assassin) who was at least 5 levels higher and had 9 groupies with him. He started counter attacking instantly (you always auto attack when attacked) and knocked away a bunch of my health. My eyes no doubt bugging out comically, I hit my “sprint” button and ran like hell. On my radar, 10 green dots stumbled about in confusion at my apparent fit of insanity and then reluctantly gave chase (they probably knew I had been sticking my grimy hands in their pockets as well). Thanks to the element of surprise, none of them snared me the instant I appeared, but I knew they would take me out if I ran into the empty desert, so instead I ran into the area they were camping. By some miracle the enemies did not agro on me, I leapt into a tent, stood still a moment, and clicked my “hide” button. My character blended into the shadows just as the leader of the group stepped into the tent, daggers drawn. His entire group followed him into the camp and I could tell he was yelling for someone to cast an AOE spell into the spot I was last seen, to flush me out. But the NPCs in the area seemed not to like this group of individuals and converged, surrounding them. Arrows lodged in exposed posteriors as they beat a hasty retreat. I’m glad none of them died, I really held no bad feelings for these people, I was just stealing a few coins to practice my new skills. But that experience was the one that popped my Shadowbane PVP cherry.

After that night of successful thievery I decided I would level for a while. Essentially there are three sections of the game Shadowbane, that are divided by level:

1. Levels 1-25. No (or very, very little) PVP.
2. Levels 26-35. Much higher risk of PVP.
3. Levels 36-60. PVP is quite common.

Just like being forced into migrating when you hit level 25, once you hit level 36 you are forced to move to a player made city. Unfortunately I have not experienced this the way it was meant to be experienced by the devs; by the time I was level 36, there were only 4 days left of beta. And pretty much all players were being funneled into two FC-created cities, Apocalypse and Doom. So rather than joining a number of friends in a small guild, to vie for power with 20 others, it was really just half the server versus the other half from the get go. Regardless of the fact that the game will never be played that way again, it seems like everyone had a blast. I know I did. Guild versus guild is pretty damn awesome. Since I’m not on broadband and my graphics card is el sucko, rather than zerging like everyone else I would step aside and look for targets of opportunity in less chaotic areas. Many a high level caster met a sudden death at the end of my blades while resting on the outskirts of battle. Seiging was far more stable than I expected and I had a ton of fun. I plan on getting a lot of kills under my belt in the future.

So to wrap this up, I am going to buy Shadowbane. [Not instantly mind you, I want to avoid the first wave of newbies flooding the servers.] It has foibles and needs a lot of minor tweaks, but I never ran into anything that stopped the game from being fun for me. Wolfpack have proven their skill as developers, in my opinion, and I think they will keep this game fresh and fun as time goes on.

It will not please everyone, nor will everyone who doesn’t like it be a “carebear”. But this is definitely the game I have been quivering in anticipation of for several years. I highly recommend that everyone give it a try, especially when and if they offer it up as a free download trial at a later date. I look forward to seeing you in Aerynth!

Bereghast The Hammer / Jirra Dawnlight / Orfantal

Cromondas · Post by **Cromondas** » Wed Apr 23, 2003 11:18 am

Was beta testing this for some time. The ideas behind it were and are fantastic but the game play will leave EQ gamers lacking. It is set up poorly in my opinion and a few of my real life friends also. We all decided to not play after Beta and instead all started daoc which is considerable more fun then SB.

Cromondas

Post by **Nadia** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:43 am

Shadowbane is now a free mmorpg (I added the info in the 1st post)