Shadowbane: Rise of Chaos
Shadowbane: Ten day trial
The initial release of Shadowbane was a definite mixed-bag that required luck and patience to be a positive experience. The Rise of Chaos expansion does a great deal to address some of the problems while rewarding those who have stuck it out, with additional areas, one new race, and several other bits & bobs. Chaos is an island off the mainland of the game and offers harder higher-level nasties that are worth more experience. With the new area there is a decent amount of new loot to be found.
Overall WP have done a great deal of work to address the lag and stability problems that have plagued the game since its launch. The, at times, totally unplayable game (especially on the Mac), is now running fairly well with only the occasional glitch. It still crashes on start-up or when changing toons or after long periods of play, but it does work well while actually functioning. Alas, some of the fun of the game has been affected by some strategic decisions by UBI. The company seem to be determined to anger their loyal fan base with some frankly idiotic decisions. In a period of about a month, all three servers on which I play have been shut down with a forced migration to another server (two with choices, one with none). Players who have spent hours and hours of time building their guild and nation have to face starting over on an existing server filled with users who are not terribly pleased about the imminent invasion. One must remember that the game is at its heart a guild vs guild/nation vs nation game. The company is attempting to get all players on the newer server maps...why the two servers being shut down could not be combined on a new server is rather beyond me. We shall see if the server that most of two servers are heading to will be able to handle the influx, either in terms of gameplay or of latency issues.
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