The game falls down once you end up on the mainland. Here casual gamers suffer and it's a place where the power-gamers dominate. To make matters worse quite a few of the game servers are dominated by uber-guilds who crush any opposition quickly. It pays to read the Ubi-soft boards, because a bad choice in servers can mean lots of frustration and very little fun. While finding your way in the new world at low level, you must all look out for ?griefers?, bored adolescents with high-level characters and mental problems who think its fun to kill low level noobs for fun and profit. They take the game's credo of "massively merciless" to mean "as long as I have fun who cares if I am ruining everyone else's game for them." Joining a guild is supposed to alleviate this problem but if you join the wrong guild or are not of the uber-one, it can mean very little.
Once in a decent guild it can be great fun and very frustrating. The Guild vs Guild fights are badly implemented and woefully unbalanced. When you include the fact that up to half your forces will crash out due to lag, sb.exe errors or being on Macintosh it can make a siege a frustrating affair. There are many who just log off or go play an alternate character when war is happening because they can't face the technical nuisance. Besides the technical issues, the game is hopelessly unbalanced when it comes to city attacks. It is patently obvious that no one at Wolfpack knows anything about medieval sieges. In almost all cases, the attackers always win. All the money spent by the city on walls are totally useless against most attacking forces. City maintenance is expensive, guards and walls almost totally useless. Needless to say the huge uber-guilds with oodles of money and bodies can quickly dominate a server if half-way intelligent.
Once you get to the mainland much of the game is merely a rodent wheel of leveling and farming money. Most of the time you are out whacking the same monster over and over again to get to the next level and get the gold needed to train or help your guild. For some reason, that is a mystery to most players, there are very few high-levels mobs to kill, so after 50 the game becomes incredibly monotonous. The political aspects mainly involve the few leaders at the top of guild and are not much for regular players. There is little hope of a casual/moderate player to get into leadership positions, so one spends one's time as a drone most of the time. Since the game is dynamic, it is entirely possible to log-out one night only to come back and find your town obliterated. While this is a nuisance and annoyance for a power gamer, it can totally ruin the game for those on less. The fact that many in a guild cannot defend their guild even if on-line does not help matters either.
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.