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Banzai
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 Posted: 03/01/03 - 05:32 Post subject: Shadowbane
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Guess I need to eat my words...
anyone else in beta?
I looked for another thread but couldn't find one.
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Selenar
Can't Stop Posting
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 584
Location: Las Vegas, NV
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Posted: 03/01/03 - 05:42 Post subject:
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<--- In Beta, as is my best friend. Honestly, I hate it, but that's just me. Best friend seems to love it...look him up, name is Krungi.
-Sel
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Banzai
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Posted: 03/01/03 - 05:52 Post subject:
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Nothing ground breaking?
d/l now
keeps saying "This account has not been selected for beta" or some such nonesene. They sent me the mail =/
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Selenar
Can't Stop Posting
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 584
Location: Las Vegas, NV
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Posted: 03/01/03 - 05:59 Post subject:
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Naw, pretty standard stuff. Graphics are post-standard, gameplay is kinda lame. The fact that group exp isn't split is kinda cool, bout it.
-Sel
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Banzai
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Posted: 03/01/03 - 06:09 Post subject:
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thanks =)
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Selenar
Can't Stop Posting
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 584
Location: Las Vegas, NV
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Posted: 03/01/03 - 06:17 Post subject:
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No problemo.
-Sel
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Kikk
Can't Stop Posting
Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 695
Location: Jacksonville, NC
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Posted: 03/02/03 - 04:04 Post subject:
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great concept but POS delivery. Honestly the game sucks ass and would not be worth playing if it was free. It has potential and hopefully one day it will be what it should but I dont see it happening any time soon,
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GruntingCod
RealPoor Master of Posts
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 6399
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Posted: 03/02/03 - 16:42 Post subject:
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Hahahahahahaah I HATE THS PEICE OF SHIT.
I got it, downloaded it, played it for like 45mins, deleted it. 8o)~
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Omol
Luke Warm
Joined: 15 Oct 2002
Posts: 304
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Posted: 03/04/03 - 02:18 Post subject:
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Banz..Ol Ogre..
I am in SB beta..dont think ill be playing it on release tho.might change mind but more than likely wont.
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Nobunaga
Toomuchtimeonhands
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 932
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Posted: 03/07/03 - 15:17 Post subject:
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Banzi, this review sums it up and the main interesting pt if you're a hardcore pvp'er is the potential political/confrontational aspect from the game once things develop.
Craftas In Da Hood
Shadowbane is not a crafter's game. For those of you who only want to 'bake bread' as the saying goes, Shadowbane is not the game for you. There is very little like the weapon and armorsmithing or jewelcraft of Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot. If you play games to bake bread, look elsewhere for your MMOG fix. There isn't really much of a mini-game to the crafting, or much skill other than managing the influx of money and the inventory being created or bought at the shop.
However, that is not to say there is not a crafting system in Shadowbane. Crafting in SB refers to the owning and operating of a vendor NPC and his shop. There are vendors for every type of weapon (swordsmith, daggersmith, bowyer, axesmith, etc.) and armor, as well as vendors for building and NPC hireling deeds, trainers for player skills and sages who create scrolls and jewelry. Each of these can make money for the player or guild shop owner. The vendor NPC's can sell goods that they make, sell goods that are sold to them by players, or "junk" items that they have made or bought, which returns the item's value in gold to the vendor's strongbox. Junking items gotten from killing monsters is one of the best ways to make gold in Shadowbane. Vendors can be upgraded or "ranked up" to make better gear and make gear faster. Vendors can also make a little money off of repairing player gear, which takes damage during fights and more damage on death.
Crafting is limited to running the shop, which means you have to know what your customers want and keep producing those types of items. Each vendor and building also has a maintenance cost; failing to pay maintenance means the building or vendor will derank or be destroyed if it is rank 1. You continually have to make sure there is money in the shop's strongbox, and items to be sold, as well as checking for items that need to be junked. Vendors with no money in the strongbox cannot buy player items. All of this is managed with an attractive HUD, which is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. One gripe I have is that setting your profit margins (which is set as a percentage) is done with the use of fiddly sliders, instead of being able to type in a number. Each building can maintain its own enemies list of players they won't sell to as well as a list of "friends" who are PC's that can manage and control the shop as well as the owner. One of the other gripes I have with the crafting is the random nature of creating magic weapons.
Normal items can be chosen and created quickly and easily. Magic items, however, are created by choosing a base item type (gothic broadsword, for example), and specifying you want a magic item. All control of what type of item comes out is then turned over to the random number generator of the shop. You could easily produce a weapon that has no special properties other than added durability, when you really need a weapon with +ATR stats added. It's a crap shoot. Magic item creation times are also quite long, often 12 hours or longer, and you can only produce as many different items as the vendor has ranks. Luckily, the cost of the item creation doesn't come out of the vendor's strongbox automatically, so you can choose which items to spend money creating. Vendors are often run as the owner's personal magic item creator, and only really dedicated vendor type players will bother to try to be profitable with them. On my scale of the Mature MMOG, I think Shadowbane is about halfway there on crafting. There are some good ideas, with mediocre implementation. There has been talk of adding different, unique resources to the crafting equation, allowing for differing types of vendors, but this is a post-release option at best.
Crafting: 4 out of 10
DING GRATZ! Or the Advancement Curve
Advancement in Shadowbane is what can only be termed as [Mod: profanity] FAST. Provided you are not a completely clueless [Mod: profanity], or an anti-social muffinsnatcher, you can level in Shadowbane pretty quickly. Shadowbane uses a system of "softcap" leveling, in that once you reach the "softcap" level (currently 60), there are no incentives to level any further. You won't gain any real additional power from more levels. Whereas in other games, the player gains few new skills, powers and abilities at early levels and a lot at later levels, such as in EQ, in Shadowbane this is reversed. The player gains lots of skills and powers quite frequently for the first 20 levels, and with much less frequency after that. By level 50, chances are you might gain one or two more powers between 50 and 60, and not much more.
Yes, Shadowbane has levels, and that is one thing that I hold against it. However, the levels mean far less than they do in other games. Levels have no meaning in "to-hit" calculations, and there are no extra bonuses to damage if you are higher level than your opponent. The power curve on Shadowbane is still fairly steep. A level 1 n00bler will not have a chance to compete 1-on-1 with a level 50; but get about 50 level 1's together, and that level 50 will think twice about being an antisocial ass pirate. The theory is that players of the same rank (a rank is 10 levels, so rank 0 is 1-9, rank 1 is 10-19, etc.) will be fairly even in a fight, and still competitive against those 1 rank higher. In my experience, this has actually held out to be pretty true. Fighting someone 2 or more ranks above me is mostly suicide, at least until I achieve rank 4. By that time, I'll have most of my good powers and will be a force to be reckoned with. The real "power" to Shadowbane's characters is in the skills.
Skills are independent of levels, though some skills don't open up until certain levels are reached. However, basic skills like your weapon of choice can be raised as high as you wish, so long as you have the gold to do so. Your skills will max at 60 + your base intelligence stat, and maxxed skills are a good idea. A level 5 with enough money could max out his weapon skill and have a real good chance of owning a higher level player, with the exception that the higher level will have more hit points. As skills are raised above a player's level, though, the costs of training the skills go up dramatically. This is called "spiking" skills. The higher level you are, the higher your skill level can go before spiking costs come into play.
The skills system, in conjunction with the class and level system, works really well for Shadowbane. It isn't my ideal system; because of the classes, you can't just take any skill you wish. Your base class and profession (which you choose at 10th level) determine what skills you get. Training certain skills up will unlock other powers and skills. Despite the fairly rigid underpinnings of a class system, the character creation system offers a stunning amount of variety. Characters of the same class can be built along completely different templates altogether, and the play experience really does vary a lot between the two. Adding in the disciplines, which are packages of powers and skills that are dropped off of certain unique mobs as runes, can create a great deal of variance between templates. Disciplines give the class system an even larger amount of variety, by spreading some profession's abilities out to other professions, though at lower power levels.
One of the real strengths of the game is this system of advancement and character creation. The amount of variety is truly staggering, and in that respect, it earns high marks on my Mature MMOG scale. It also loses points, however, in that there is no way to undo [Mod: profanity] in character creation. It is extremely easy to gimp your character, especially if you do not have a plan for the character starting out. Since there is no respeccing, and currently little documentation official or otherwise, the only option you'll have at this point is to toss the character and start over. Luckily, the leveling curve, while present, is fast, provided you group with others. The estimates are that real catasses can reach the softcap in a week, most powergamers in a month, and casual gamers somewhere between one to two months, assuming that you group. If you attempt to solo, it will take longer, and be harder. Much harder.
Advancement and Character Creation: 9 out of 10
Questing for the Foozle
Shadowbane does not as yet have a questing system in place. There are no "kill-tasks" or NPC-generated missions in-game. The closest thing to that is talking with some of the NPC's about your profession, which you choose at level 10, and the safehold runemaster's dialogue options, which amount to "Where do I hunt around here?"
That is not to say there aren't quests; they just aren't in the game's mechanics yet. Players can hire you to do any number of tasks, but there is no in-game system that tracks jobs, or missions. There have been a number of "mercenary" guilds in game that hire themselves out for various missions, such as scouting missions, extra bodies for sieges, harassment by killing hunting groups, and anything else you can think of. Groups like Grey Ghost Recon and Shadow Alliance have attempted with varying degrees of success to parlay their skills into mercenary cities. The biggest problem with mercenary guilds goes back to the accountability issues. If you help one guild destroy a second guild's town, people will assume you are allied with the attacking guild. Which means those who are enemies with the attackers won't be too keen on hiring you. Some might get so p****d off as to siege the mercenary town.
There has been talk of adding some form of quest system to the game, but for now, it's a moot point.
Questing and Mission Generation: 2 out of 10
Saturday Night Fight
The combat system in most MMOG's is boring enough to bring tears to the eyes. Asheron's Call 2 brought new meaning to the criticism "lack of player interaction." My article on combat had a lot of ideas about a slow-paced, turn-based thinking man's type of combat system. Shadowbane is not that system.
For starters, Shadowbane's combat is real-time, like most other MMOG's. It bears a resemblance to other MMOG's, in that you hit your attack button, defaulted to Ctrl-A, and sit back to watch. Well, you do that if you are a complete [Mod: profanity] moron. For player's with a pulse, you hit A, then began to use powers, abilities and spells to hand out some beatdown. No matter what profession you choose, by the time you hit level 30, you'll probably have a choice of between 10-20 different powers to use. By powers I mean anything from "weapon styles" for melees or archers, spells for mages and healers, and abilities that come from your profession. By the time you hit 50, you'll end up having somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or more powers to choose from, each of which can be hotkeyed, or have a clickable button dragged onto the desktop. Depending on how you've built your character, you could have a different set of options from another character of the same profession.
Shadowbane shines in the combat field because of the options in powers. Powers don't just amount to "This power does more damage, this power hits better, etc." There are resistance debuffers, damage adds, bleeding (DOT) powers, different damage type powers, stuns, bolts, AOE powers, healing, buffing, etc. etc. etc. Learning the right combination of powers is what makes you viable in PVP.
For example, my melee-based barbarian might use a slashing resistance debuff against a caster, then hit the caster with a bleed, an attack rating debuff and then switch to straight damage. Against an archer, I'd hope to hit the attack rating debuff, attack speed debuff, then bleed him to prevent him stealthing, or try to stun him to keep him from kiting me, and if he starts running, hit my sprint to catch up with him. Against a melee character, I'd hit attack rating debuff, attack speed debuff, then open him up with a slashing debuff. However, if I knew I had archer's on my side, I'd hit him with a piercing debuff as well, so their bows would do more damage. And that's with an intensely melee-focused barbarian who lacks ranged options or spells. Add on a Bounty Hunter discipline that would allow me to snare my targets, or Stormlord that gives me an Area of Effect lightning storm spell and my options increase.
The combat system is good, really good. You continually have to think about the opponent you are fighting. The only complaint I have is that combat is about 10% too fast for my tastes. With some combinations of classes, combat can be astonishingly quick, especially when there is a disparity in rank. A difference in rank of one can still be an even contest. With a difference of two or more ranks, expect the higher rank to win 90% of the time 1 on 1.
But 1 on 1 PVP is not the focus of the game. Guild vs. guild warfare is where the game both shines and falls on its face. Right now there are a number of client-side framerate problems with large groups fighting. This is to be expected, as there has not been an MMOG to date that can handle groups of 100 on each side casting spells and blasting away at each other without slowing most machines to a crawl. There is good news, though. It's fixable. The graphics engine is very scaleable; the latest build also added a simple slider for setting particle effect density. Particle effects are all those nice glowy effects that casters and healers produce when they use their spells. It's also usually the first thing you turn off when entering large-scale group combat. The new slider allows you to set the density at a percentage without having to relog into the game. This works perfectly and has greatly improved framerates in large battles. As we get closer to release, I expect some significant graphics optimizations that will help a lot. I mention this only because it is an issue for many and is an important thing to consider. Make sure your computer has 256 MB of RAM for Shadowbane, and the more you get, the better off you'll be, no matter what the system requirements say.
The siege system as it currently is has not been in the game long, so there hasn't been a huge amount of experience with it. I will say that I love the concepts, and feel the system is pretty close to the "way it should be done" with perhaps a few minor tweaks for balance. I won't go into specifics too much here, as the mechanics can be read about on the Shadowbane site. I will say that NPC guards do protect your city well, but don't expect them to be your only defense. Good city building will be just as important as good PVP performance in order to outlast a siege. There are a huge number of different combinations for city design, all of which will have an impact on how well you can defend the city, as well as how easy it is to take. From the location of barracks, to the buildings you "protect" with your tree's mystical powers, to the amount of gold in your coffers and the placement of wall archers, everything will have an effect on sieging.
This is another place where Shadowbane shines. What at first glance might seem to be a shallow game of level up by killing monsters so you can gank others in a Quake-deathmatch style gives way to something completely different if you go below the surface. Shadowbane is like an onion. There are layers upon layers of gameplay, each more complex than the last. A lot of the interactions at each layer are subtle. Not only do you have the character creation aspect, and the combat and acquisition of gear; you also have the game of nation-building, which involves the disciplines of city design, defense, PVP and raiding, economic management and probably most important and ephemeral of all, the political game. While it is theoretically possible for one person to manage all that, he'd have to eat, drink and sleep Shadowbane. Delegation of authority and the management of nations will take a guild, and a well-organized one at that. While it is possible to "walk da earth like Kane in Kung Fu" in Shadowbane, chances are you won't experience half the gameplay in the world. Characters will need the support of a guild for training, weapon and armor repair, and protection from the predators who will infest the world. It will be a hard road for the solo player, at least as hard as in other MMOG's.
But for the guilded player, the world is your oyster.
Combat and Gameplay: 9 out of 10
I Am Stricken With Grief
Will there be griefing in Shadowbane? As I said in the article on Accountability, griefing is as subjective as art. This has never been truer than in Shadowbane. In a world that encourages you to kill your neighbor and take all his [Mod: profanity], what can reasonably be considered grief? Is the stupidiot name 'dafortysippah' grief? Is camping someone's bind point and killing him over and over and over until all his gear breaks from item degradation grief? How does one handle grief in Shadowbane?
The good news is 'dafortysippah' can get his punk ass handed back to him on a platter if you are so inclined. He'll probably welcome the fight and whine about it when he loses, but there's an ignore feature. In an arena where consequences for [Mod: profanity] can be immediate and deadly, the griefer is not so much a game-breaker as he is an opportunity to hone your player skills. Things like stealing from your enemies or killing them while they are out gathering experience and farming gold aren't grief so much as good strategy. Killstealing and ninjalooting could again be considered strategy in the game of thrones. However, accountability is actually handled a lot better than I thought it would have been in this game.
One way that accountability works in this game is through the Heraldry list. Anytime you target a player, you can open your Heraldry list, underneath guild options, and drag a player's crest to that list. From then on, you can drag that crest to a building's Kill on Sight list, which makes that player kill on sight to any guards under that asset or for vendors, the vendor will not trade with that person. Additionally, you can buy warrants from a runemaster; drag the player's crest to the warrant, and you can trade this warrant with another person. He can then transfer that grief player's crest to any buildings he owns, or give the warrant to someone else to do the same. Warrants are dirt cheap, on the order of 300 gold.
Additionally, any time you are killed by another player, you have a death list, located under Guild Options. It works the same way as the Heraldry list. Anytime you transfer that crest from either Heraldry or Death lists to a building's KOS list, it asks if you wish to KOS the individual, guild or nation. If you just want the lone griefer, or want to KOS the guy no matter what guild he joins, you choose individual. If it's a matter of making his entire guild an enemy, or the nation of guilds his guild belongs to, you can choose that as well. And while guard AI is not perfect, you can be reasonably assured that if this guy shows up in your city, he'll be attacked.
Since the death list captures the player's crest, you can see what guild they belonged to when they killed you. Even should he change guilds, transferring an individual to a KOS list captures his current guild. As a result, PKers cannot hide behind an anonymous tag, or by switching between errant and guilded when the situations requires it. If your guild is being constantly harassed by another guild, you can go to war, burning down their city and hearing the lamentations of their women. Burninating the neighborhood, or something.
The system works pretty well, mainly because after level 35, players must be either bound to a player city, or be considered errant. An errant player does not receive the experience bonus that all guilded players get, and when he dies or logs on, he returns to the world at one of many ruins scattered about the fragment. These are not listed on the main world map, and may or may not be anywhere near a suitable hunting ground or a city. One of the flaws of this system of errantry, however, is that once players reach the softcap and leveling is no longer needed, they have no reason to worry about being errant. They are untraceable, as they have no city or guild crest. They can get their weapons or armor repaired in the safeholds, and they can make a living killing people in hunting grounds and taking the loot they've gotten. The beta community has not had a significant problem with these types, but until recently, it has been a fairly small, tight-knit community. It remains to be seen whether the flood of cockmongers that are sure to hit the game at release will be as controllable as the beta populace has been.
The other hole in their accountability feature is their insistence on multiple characters per account. Every account gets five character slots total. Making multiple throwaway grief characters is an option for dodging accountability. I have a feeling their customer service resources will be sorely tested on release, due to the inherent inability of a small minority of the PVP crowd to act as anything less than retarded sociopaths. That small minority can create major problems for a large proportion of the populace, if neither the guilds or the developers are prepared to handle it.
Accountability: 6 out of 10
Marketing, Beta Test and the Trial of the Boobies
Sorry, Wolfpack, UbiSoft and GodGames, but I'm going to have to ding your actions on Shadowbane in this area. You have done the games industry a great injustice, and you've done it for a long time.
The game of Shadowbane has probably been the most over-hyped creation in the games industry since Daikatana. With the exception of the time between publishers, there has not been a quarter that has gone by where some gaming magazine or web site has not run a preview story proclaiming Shadowbane to be the savior of the online gaming world and PVP as we know it. There have been cheap stunts like Wet T-Shirt contests for beta accounts, countless E3 videos, the infamous Shadowboobies ad, the pre-order CD which gave the purchaser a $10 discount, access to the restricted races and a CD only useful for a coaster, as well as tons of interviews, dev chats and message board posts. Gaming message boards have been swamped with hordes of fanbois and their 400k graphical signatures that pimped their vapor message board guild ever since "Play 2 Crush" hit the stands. And it's all been horribly, horribly wrong.
Much of the overabundance of hype can be contributed to GodGames apparent business/publishing strategy of "hype first, publish later." The length of the hype as well as the beta period can also be laid at the feet of switching publishers mid-development. After the GodGames deal fell through, I'm sure there was serious doubt at Wolfpack as to whether the game could be finished without publisher backing. So there have been some extenuating circumstances. But damn, there have been some times where shutting up would have been preferable to hyping.
Unfortunately, it's worked. I don't think anyone who follows online games in even the smallest capacity can claim to not have heard of Shadowbane. Whether that hype translates into box sales and subscriptions, we'll see. Luckily, the only Shadowboobies in sight nowadays are the Minotaur man-boobs adorning the rather phallic cover shot on the Shadowbane box art.
As for the beta, it has been used extensively as a marketing tool. I'm quite positive that at some points during the development stages, you could have offered up a beta account to the frothing masses on the official boards in exchange for the head of another board poster, and the front offices of Wolfpack would have resembled Transylvania after Vlad the Impaler got done with the Turks. With the exception of Star Wars Galaxies, I don't think any other beta garnered quite as much desire to beta test as Shadowbane. Even if they just wanted to "see how much it sucks," people wanted beta accounts like they were organ transplants.
On a good note, the beta test has actually been used to, you know, TEST the game. Since I joined in July, a huge number of bugs and exploits have been fixed, and feedback from the beta community has been utilized. The game has improved dramatically, though often times in alternating spurts of furious activity and frustrating inaction. Feedback between the developers and the beta community has been overall fairly positive, though there were a number of times when it felt like Wolfpack just wasn't talking. But it is encouraging to see suggestions you've made get turned into code in the next patch. There are still bugs to be found in this current build, and I'm sure there still will be some that will continue into release, should the March 25th ship date hold firm. That is the unfortunate nature of this industry. Wolfpack has not been as diligent as I'd like in banning serial exploiters from the beta, but exploiting is a sore point with me. I take a harder line than someone running a beta test might.
On a good note, one piece of the hype machine is something I have to give Wolfpack credit for. The War Journals, while clearly being used as fluffy hype pieces, have also been pretty informative about the game. Their commitment to the Herald programs is also admirable; Vosx has stated that they want the Age of Strife web site to be the community site that highlights the player base and their actions. Since the actions of groups of players and individuals can actually change the world, this seems a logical way to trumpet not only that game feature, but to reward the players who make the most efforts with notoriety.
Marketing Hype and Beta: 3 out of 10
All in Da Bidness
I won't speak too much about the business aspect of Shadowbane, as they haven't launched yet and much of that article is built around an already launched system. Wolfpack decided to build a game engine of its own, which was the vogue back in the day. I'm sure part of the delays they've experienced have been due to the troubles in writing your own engine, and could serve as a lesson to other small developers. Get some pieces off the shelf, or expand your timeline. They have made a commitment to a community site, as mentioned above. And they have planned the game around at least a five-year lifespan, which means they are thinking long-term as opposed to short term profits. I'll have to say I think that the marriage of Wolfpack and UbiSoft is working out well, even though I get the feeling Ubi is perhaps pushing that March deadline harder than they should be. But it's not my money they are using to build the thing, so what do I know?
Bidness: 6 out of 10
Everything Else I Could Remember to Write About
For the closing parts of this review, I'll just try to touch on some things not mentioned in the previous sections and wrap it up. It's a bit long in the tooth already, but I feel these deserve some mention.
The recorder function in Shadowbane is an entirely new feature to MMOG's, one that has not been used before, to my knowledge. The idea is that you set the recorder to record gameplay, and it records everything that's happening around you in a small text file. Using the Shadowbane client while offline, you can view the recording just as if you were playing the game, moving the camera at will. The files it generates are tiny, somewhere around 300k for a few minutes. I've seen some long movie files that run many MB's in size. No matter what your client settings when you record the "video," you can up the detail settings on the playback and watch the movie in all its highest detail glory. Anyone who has the client can play the recording back, and anyone with the knowledge to do video screen capture can turn the recording into an MPG or AVI file. Scouts can send back actual pictures and walkthroughs of enemy fortresses. Tactics of sieges and battles can be replayed and reviewed. It's one helluva cool feature, something I'd not have thought possible. Currently, it causes a significant performance hit when recording, but there is an optimization fix for this listed in the next patch notes.
The beta community had, up until recently, been fairly small and tight-knit. Though I wouldn't say that everyone in beta was a mature, stable individual, cockmongery was not rampant in the game. With the addition of 10,000 teeming new masses, this has changed, and in some ways, the community has changed. There are lots of people who act any way they want, completely in ignorance of standard beta practices and customs. d**k-waving has always been a problem, though there have been relatively few posts proclaiming the "ownage" of others by individuals. Guilds seem to take care of those posts all on their own, without needing random PKer_976 to post his badly punctuated treatise on the **** orientation of some hapless n00b he plastered the previous night. Amazingly enough, even with the hordes of stupidiots pouring into the game, the accountability system has been working for the most part. As a guild member whose tree is currently open for anyone to bind or teleport to, we haven't seen a lot of random PKing at our tree. What we have seen more often is enemies and friends appearing there to either kill us at our tree or quickly let us know that their tree has been attacked. The stupid is alive and well in Shadowbane, make no mistake, but it hasn't killed the game for me.
One thing missing is the ability for guilds to really promote themselves and recruit in-game. There is not nearly enough information about a guild to be discovered in the game, This could be helped by the addition of guild recruitment NPC's that can be bought and placed in safeholds. Hopefully this will be added in the future. The lack of this isn't a game killer, but it does make for a tough new player experience.
The new siege system is an impressive concept; it allows guilds to know when they absolutely have to be there to defend their city. It cuts down on the ability of the 4 a.m. raid to destroy entire cities with little effort. The biggest drawback to the system right now is that it hasn't been tested nearly thoroughly enough, in my opinion, and will likely undergo a good deal of balance tweaking even into release. As players get creative with the system, holes in it will need to be fixed as quickly as possible. After all, sieging is a big portion of the game once a character reaches 40 or higher. It's one of the best places to get involved in PVP, and is the most significant way a group of players or guild can make an impact on the world. Client lag and lockup issues are also present at the moment, hindering the testing of large-scale combat. Despite all of that, I still find sieging and PVP a crapload of fun. There is just nothing like the rush as you see trebuchets tossing flaming shot at the walls of an immense castle, while the defenders sally forth en masse to try to break through the attacker's ranks to destroy the bane circle. It just doesn't get any better than that.
Finally, do not let yourself fall into the traps of the past. Do not expect Shadowbane to be some kind of MMOG savior, the EQ killer, or for some huge watershed event to accompany the release of Shadowbane. It won't give you [Mod: inappropriate] while playing, your apartment will still need to be cleaned, and tooth decay will still be a danger with the game installed on your hard drive. While it may once and for all legitimize open PVP for the MMOG marketplace, it won't all of a sudden turn hordes of EQ PVE fanatics into PKers. It is not the first and last word in PVP MMOG's. There's still plenty of room for different types of PVP in MMOG games, like Meridian 59, Dark Age of Camelot or Anarchy Online. Fans of those games may or may not like the way PVP is presented in Shadowbane, and more hardcore PK's may hate some of the things in Shadowbane that they'd term "carebear" like the Safeholds.
In the end, it's a game that I enjoy immensely. Since the release of the 3.0 build, I have become hopelessly addicted to the game. It has hit most of my hot buttons for what I want in an MMOG. The PVP is detailed, dynamic, and success involves a great deal of thought and player skill. There are a staggering amount of options available to the player, letting him determine how much of the game he wants to experience. It has areas that could use improvement, such as the guild management system, class balance, resource acquisition, ease of use and PVE. But you should never play a game for what it might become; play it for what it is right now. And right now, even with bugs that hamper it, the game is more fun than any released MMOG I can think of. For me. It also succeeds at one of the most important aspects of the Mature MMOG. It lets the players affect the world and other players around them.
Should you spend your filthy lucre on it? That's up to you to decide. I won't tell you if it's worth the money for you. Me? It's already in the March budget. I'm buying it, and I hope to be owning and being owned on release day. Play 2 Crush, yo…. There's Minotaurs on the horizon.
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