Shadowbane Releases New Asian-Specific MMO Fork

Thanks to Waterthread.org for its messageboard thread pointing to major new Asian-specific features for UbiSoft's PC MMO title Shadowbane, following Asian publisher En-Tranz's decision to create a separate version of the game to better meet "the needs of the Asia-Pacific players." This unique split, with 2 development teams working on different version of the same MMO, has led to Asian-specific changes such as "a 'WASD' control scheme (no more mouse clicking movement)", a new experience curve ("players can now reach level 20 much more easily but as players reach the higher levels, it gets much more difficult"), and a general "newbie experience overhaul." Update: 03/01 19:07 GMT by S : In related news, UbiSoft has just announced the purchase of Wolfpack Studios, creators of ShadowBane.

Re:We Love Asia

[Anonymous Coward]

How did this get a +2 insightful?! This is the dumbest post I've ever read. "An asian version of the game would be good because hard core gamers would buy an asian version of the game"??? Whatever! It's an ASIAN SERVER dude. That's it.

Failed on alot of aspects.

[darkmayo]

They had a great concept but the game was plagued with many problems.

Stability during large scale PvP conflicts, I remember one incident quite well that took place on treachery, a large force of Shadowclan, KGB and other clans was heading to attack a Covenant of Swords town, COS caught wind of the attack (not that hard considering there is only one portal you can jump from continent to continent from) so they intercepted the attacking force. As the armies approched the game turned into a horrid slideshow where a majority of the combatants got Sb.exe errors or lagged out completely. Those remaining where subjected to a joke of a battle. This happend pretty much every time a large force of players met up, and considering that is a huge part of Shadowbane the game failed there. (I understand that things have become more stable but that might just be because alot of people stopped playing the game)

Leveling up failed pretty bad as well. (Which I heard has changed but lets look back a bit) There was very few good leveling spots in the game, on the one continent there was one, and that was crap when you got into your 40's.

Game Economics wasn't that great either, It took a long time to get your city built up costing alot of time farming money (which goes back to the 2nd issue of crappy places to get cash)and it takes very little time to take down everything that you worked for, especially once your Tree of Life is camped by the enemy forces, You can't spawn in your town at that time.

Lastly the fact that there was only one spot to get the commander rune, which was an essential rune for sieging. So for the longest time that rune was monopolized by whoever was in beta and knew where it was.