Ubisoft To Shut Down Shadowbane 74
tyen writes "Ubisoft has announced the shutdown of Shadowbane, the first major, fantasy role-playing MMO with true PVP (full asset destruction possible). The shutdown will take place in about two weeks, at the start of May. No official reason has been given by Ubisoft, but running an MMO for free for the past three years, with no significant improvement in market growth during that period, could play a part in the decision. There's been no response from Ubisoft yet on calls to open source the code. "
Not done yet (Score:1)
You are going to see a *lot* of this in the next 2 years or so.
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the market is not flooded. It's dominated by one major force that has huge shares and everybody else is fighting for scraps.
Whether or not WOW is worth the share it has is another question, but it's the number one reason why there's so little room.
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Well, the competition is failing to take away WoW's marketshare. I don't think WoW is so terribly unique that there's no way anybody could ever make a competitor that will beat it but it doesn't look like the competition has any clue how to make one.
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Re:Not done yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not done yet (Score:4, Funny)
EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena
I object to this ignorant oversimplification of EVE's player demographic. I have absolutely no interest in economic simulations!
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Exactly! We're in it for the submarines...I mean spaceships!
(Inside joke, EVE spaceships behave as though they're flying in a fluid)
Possible reason? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Maybe Ubisoft has another reason altogether. What if they plan to use the servers for another MMO?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Possible reason? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would never, ever play a microtransaction game. I've been playing since my 7x GM tankmage in UO, 50 druid in EQ1, Doctor/Bounty Hunter in SWG (pre NGE), and current 75 mage in WoW. Along the way I've tried EQ2, Asheron's Call, AC2, AO, AoC, Vanguard, and LOTRO. I've never had a character deleted. I've come back 1, 2, 3 years later either paid or during free come back promotions and my characters have always been there.
I would never play a game with ads in it either.
Want your MMORPG to succeed? Fix the bugs. Don't let overpowered classes/specs/builds run rampant for too long (i.e. crossbows, tamers in UO, combat medics in SWG, rogues in WoW). Make new content. Set up a decent grind.
The subscription model is in no danger of dying.
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What's that have to do with microtransactions?
Microtransactions games don't delete characters for inactivity.
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I think the original post was trying to link letting a subscription lapse with having your assets deleted.
This is usually not the case, as the other poster pointed out.
I would think that neither microtransaction or subscription games would delete your characters, honestly. It would depend on the particular terms of the game, I suppose.
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If you've played WoW, then you've played a micro-transaction game with a subscription.
Blizzard does it in to form of the trading card game and codes within the packs that gets you stuff. Naturally, the codes for the really cool stuff are rare making you buy more cards.
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Microtransactions probably would not fly for a pvp based game like shadowbane. If they give advantages people quit because the game is a piece of shit where you have to buy your status. If they are cosmetic it does not appeal to the playerbase and no one buys them.
It is a good idea for some games but does not work for all of them.
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"If they are cosmetic it does not appeal to the playerbase and no one buys them."
I did not play SB(for more than a day) but on ACDT no one even had matching armor. The players on NPK servers would bling out in their matching armor type and matching loot gen colours but it would take relatively small comprimises to do it. Many DT players would not even dye their stuff to match in colour when that was nearly free in ingame currency.
I do not think that players of 6 year old FFA pvp mmos buy bling. It may be th
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PvP (Score:1)
Re:PvP (Score:5, Interesting)
The only other thing that I liked was the extremely flexible nature of character classes. A single class could have many different viable builds, each one drastically different. The same class could be a super-high defense low damage tank, a high-damage decent defense melee dps, or a decent ranged nuker. Some of the builds were in fact completely unintentional and only came about due to experimentation.
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First MMO with True PVP? (Score:2)
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I assume it mean what the short description says? That is, player kills player, other players is DEAD, there is no going back, resurrect, .. Get a new char and start over if you fail in combat.
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What they mean by "true PvP" is that unlike in every other MMO out there, the cities were player-made and player-run. Player-made cities were the only place to get the top-end gear and player-made cities were the only place where you could train your characters to full. And in Shadowbane, you could destroy other people's cities.
That's where the real draw was. In practice you never lost much when your character died, but to lose the city you and your guild built was truly devastating. People fought tooth and
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Unchecked PvP where you lose your stuff is what destroyed Lineage 2. Shadowbane didn't invent the idea. My guess is that it helped destroy Shadowbane too.
In L2 they started things out with pvpers being on the short end of the stick for almost a year, by flagging them red and letting non-pvpers kill them without turning pvp themselves. It was a really good system and I'd like to see another game use it as well. At some point, they decided to turn this off to allow massacres to take place.
This is the point at
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Shadowbane was amazing (Score:3, Informative)
I played it for about a year and a half when it was new. It had a pretty decent following though nothing anywhere near the level of something like WoW.
It was really fun though especially during a "bane". For those who didn't play, a bane was when you effectively declared war on someone else's city. Once set up, each side was given a set amount of time to prepare (like a day or a week or something, I forget) and then once it went off, all of the town's buildings were vulnerable and if you destroyed their tree of life, their town was taken over by the other team. Shadowbane wasn't about gold, loot or missions though there was plenty of that. It was about full on guild vs guild battles. I've never really found a MMO with quite the same experience. So this is very sad for me even though I have no time to play a game like this anyway.
Ultimately, I think it was killed by griefers, people who didn't like PvP leaving the game and constant crashing that they didn't fully fix until about the time I stopped playing.
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I thought the game was an experiment to see how many bugs a person can tolerate.
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Shadowbane wasn't about gold, loot or missions though there was plenty of that. It was about full on guild vs guild battles. I've never really found a MMO with quite the same experience.
while not on the fantasy side, EVE Online has the most epic-drama-fueled-PVP where conflicts between thousands of players are a regular day to day thing.
Skip EVE (Score:1, Troll)
I find it silly to play a game like that- like trying to play a game when there's a explicitly biased umpire/referee.
If I wanted corruption on top of conflicts between thousands of people day to day, I already have real life for that.
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If you don't get it, here's a car analogy from you.
Nerfing is telling the race car teams that from now on they have to use a certain sort of tyres, or reduce downforce.
Sure it might affect some teams more than others, but it applies to all teams.
Corruption and cheating is when you allow one team to get inside info or resources that they are not supposed to have. For example they get a tip off from the race organizers what th
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I found that time period in shadowbane to be a slowing of performance until the inevitable sb.exe error and crash to desktop. That's the only reason I left the game :(
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Because it was released 6 years ago. It was a novel game for it's time. A lot of original elements in the game. The mechanics of it were pretty fun. Unfortunately the game had tons of problems, bugs, class balance issues, and severe lag also. Large scale combat would frequently overload the servers and make it impossible to do anything. At most probably only 100 players per side was sort of okay. But at that time, it was fairly common for battles to have upwards of 200-300 people, per side. That was due to the formation of alliances among guilds, and some guilds managing to attain a large membership, over a thousand players. Once people had been driven away by all the bugs, exploits and other issues, the game never recovered. I came back years later and it was pretty much empty. Another victim of an "early" launch. A few more months, and more testing and it could have been much better.
Trecares
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If you played any mmorpg's at all 6 years ago, it would have been very difficult to not hear about Shadowbane or see one of it's adds.
Besides it being a top 5 game in terms of population, there was little competition then, UO, Everquest, heck SWG wasn't even released 6 years ago. Although I never played it for any length of time, Shadowbane reviews, adds, etc were on every gaming site I frequented...not sure how you could have missed them unless you used AOL or something.
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behind the Shadowbane curtain (Score:5, Interesting)
I once hit up a friend of mine for a job who worked at Shadowbane's developer, Wolfpack Studios [wikipedia.org]. I was hoping to work on the back end database. Turned out they didn't have a formal rdbms behind the game. All player data, etc. was stored in flat files. I offered to help migrate them to a more reliable, higher performance database architecture, but they weren't interested. I think the lifecycle of the product had moved beyond architecture development and they only had the budget for ongoing maintenance (circa 2003).
Seth
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I had heard of it, but almost 3-4 years before its release; so long ago I had just bought a Voodoo5 when I first heard about the game. I knew there was no way they could keep the hype at a fevered pitch for so long. They originally had problems nailing down a publisher before finally securing a deal with Ubisoft. I was excited by the concept and they put a lot of work into the mythology of the game, but I was really disappointed by the execution.
The class/race/character design system was needlessly com
guess it's hard to advertise a free game. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is it I only find out about these free mmorpg's just as they shut down?
Wub
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First major what? (Score:1)
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I'm pretty sure it came out before UO finished it's beta phase.
Legends of Kesmai was just Island of Kesmai with a GUI. IoK dates back to 1985.
It was just another case of releasing too early (Score:2)
They had a lot of ambitious ideas, but they pushed it out way too early and it showed. It's just another example of bean counters pushing to see a fast ROI and so they pressure the devs into writing too much too fast. That always results in kludgy, fragile code...guaranteed death for an MMORPG. Shadowbane was dead before it left closed beta.
The business plan of MMORPGs is long game; They need a subscriber base that at least remains constant but ideally grows over time. But that requires a critical mass
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Only MMO I ever enjoyed... (Score:1, Interesting)
Shadowbane is, to this day, the only MMO I ever enjoyed. Without a robust PvP model like Shadowbane had, no other MMO seems worth the hassle (or the $15/month).
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Darkfall has advertised it should have a very robust PvP model. It seemes to be modeled after pre-Trammel UO, where skills are king and equipment is secondary.
don't believe the hype (Score:2)
It was too good to be true (Score:1)