Shadowbane
(Ubi-soft)
What follows is a tale of misery, murder and madness, not for the faint of heart. It tells the story of a place which had so much promise but is suffering from the dreaded lag-monster, mindless servers and the evil sb.exe daemon. All three are able to fell the strongest warrior at the top of his abilities. They threaten to destroy the world so lovingly created by the gods of Wolfpack.
Thanks again go to Stan at the MacSmith for my review copy.
Many of you may have read my initial thoughts post on this game about a month ago. I would love to be able to tell that all of my concerns have been addressed. In some ways things have gotten better and in other ways they have gotten worse, much worse. Every update sees those who are helped (the last one was good for we Mac users) and others hurt. There have even been unprecedented incidents of hacking (the ultimate player killing where whole towns were decimated) and bug exploiting (placing banes on Trees of Life right before resets). There are tales of certain servers always going down when its convenient for the beta uber-guild.
Technically the game is rather rubbish with frequent application crashes for both Mac and PCs (mostly during Guild vs Guild events: the whole raison d' etre of the game). The servers (owned by Ubi) are atrocious. For the majority of the weekends since launch, a significant chunk of players were unable to access the game. When the log-in servers are working there have been cases of characters getting deleted and long delays getting in (or normally back after a crash). Most servers are unbearably laggy during all but late night hours. When large number of characters are on screen, frame rates can under 10 for long periods of time. Rubber bandings, monster teleportation (via bug) and lag spikes are a common occurrence.
Initially the game is rather fun to play, with leveling fairly easy on newbie isle. On this island, pking is not allowed and it's a fairly laid back affair. It is easy to get your character to where you don't have to worry about death all the time. People tend to be helpful and kind, and most of the time asking a question will get a answer. The monsters available to hunt come in all shapes and sizes needed for players up to level 21 (when you get booted from the isle). Even the most casual gamer has the chance to have quite a bit of fun pottering around "noob isle" leveling, making some dosh, training and getting neat stuff.
Article comments
1 - Bailey
I agree 100% with this. Sadly a sucide bomber has a better chance of living than one of ubi/wp customers getting decent let alone good customer service. The game is o should still be in beta, I guess thats why the asian market is still not charging their customers.
2 - jazz
Sorry you had a bad experience. You should have taken your own advice and gotten yourself on an interesting server then writing this review. As it stands, your review just sounds like a whine. You obviously haven't had a chance to play on a "competitive" server.
3 - Marty Dodge
And you comment jazz just sounds like a fanboi response. I played mostly on one of the better servers in fact: Chaos.
I notice you attack me personally and ignore all my comments about the technical problems with the game. Do you deny they exist? Or is the unreliability and bug-fest acceptable to you?
BTW I never said I had a bad experience. A decent amount of my time playing SB (when I could get on) was jolly good fun. I based this review on my experience and those of others who I have talked to, playing on a variety of servers on both Mac and PC.
4 - Chris W
I am in, or was in, an uber guild. I was on the side that almost always won. However, I totally agree with EVERYTHING mentioned in this article especially the part about quiting after 2 months. I subscribed for 3 months and still have 2 months left but already cancelled. I'm just sick of the errors, shitty support, lag, server downtime, and lack of customer support. Bye Shadowbane.
5 - Marty Dodge
Its amusing to see the fanbois and some of the moderators on the SB boards do amazing machinations to defend the poor product that is Shadowbane. BTW it will shock no one to hear the servers are acting up again this weekend. No access, several servers have crashed during prime time...etc.
6 - Tim Hall
Has anyone ever succeeded in producing a MMORPG without the hordes of PKing munchkins? Until that day, I'm sticking to human-moderated text-based games.
7 - Austin
well, first I have to say this comment is entirely arbitrary and based on my own experience on just one server.
The bugs, lag, server problems, etc can't be denied.. generally (if you can get in) you don't have many problems.. but the massive seiges are a joke. especially in a game where the heart of it is supposed to large guild vs. guild battles, it's frustrating to not even be able to play through such a seige without getting booted three or four times. as far as PK griefers, I have to say I never had much of a problem with them.. they were annoying when I was a newbie, but as soon as I joined a guild, the griefers disappeared and PK'ing in the game turned into something akin to organized warfare.. which was for the most part enjoyable, and would've been 10x more so if it hadn't been for the lag and sb.exe errors. you can't say that seiges are unbalanced.. the attacking force always wins? not when the defenders outnumber them... I've been on plenty of raids that got wiped out by a larger force of defenders. I have to admit walls and guards are pointless.. guards need a much better AI and serve only to slow down attackers while the defenders organize their forces; walls are a joke, thanks to group flight. beyond that, what it comes down to is who has more people and, to a smaller extent, how well organized and how good at PK'ing each force is. the guards and walls at least give the defender a little time to gather together anyone they have available to fight.. once the attackers get within the walls and confront them, it's only a question of who has more people.
Overall, I had a fun time; it was a good couple months, and I don't regret buying the game.. but then there are games I've stayed with for a year or more, and this one just doesn't compare.
8 - Abirab
Yep, totally in agreement. All the hopes I had of some interesting politics and siege warfare... PFFT. I'll leave the technical issues out of it, there's too many to count. Politics turned out to be about as efficacious as trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic; siege warfare was only amusing up until most of the forces went "poof". Even until then, unless you're at *least* R4, you're either a summon bot in my chosen profession or the groups are so poorly organized (i.e., there's no truly efficient way for leaders to communicate in game) that there's often a billion healers in a single group not healing anyone except those lucky enough to sprint back to the Tree and yell "HEAL!".
In short the game and its players really need to grow up before this is going to be what it promised to be.
9 - lplimac
Thank you for saving me the $37 on a game that would frustrate me to no end. *sigh* guess I'll wait for WoW.