Shadowbane

published by Ubi Soft

Genre : MMORPG

In the world of MMORPGs, one thing you can't help noticing is that player vs. player (PvP) combat is not typically the central focus of the game, even if they offer certain servers and options that make it possible. While there are almost always ways in which two players can have it out if they both consent, the focus of most MMORPGs so far has been player vs. environment (PvE), where groups of players fight cooperatively against computer controlled monsters. Furthermore, for a host of reasons, PvE is clearly the preference of the overwhelming majority of MMORPG players. Shadowbane set out to change all that by shifting the emphasis onto PvP, team on team conflicts, sieges, and territorial domination. Considering that, because of the obvious imbalances created by level differences between characters, PvP in most MMORPGs leaves a lot to be desired, this was a rather risky move. Today, some gamers consider Shadowbane the only decent option for serious PvPers, while others point to it as a perfect example of why PvP in MMORPGs is, quite simply, no fun.

Background

Player built cities and guilds are central to Shadowbane. Unlike many MMORPGs which have pre-defined realms warring with each other, in SB there are as many sides as players choose to form. Any player with sufficient resources may start a guild, found a city, recruit other players, and lead their kingdom to greatness.

You do have to level up quite a bit before your character will be of much use in combat with other players or sieges. To that end, you go around in groups killing mobs of monsters to gain experience, riding the familiar level treadmill for a while. Once you reach the middle levels of the game, you join or form a guild, help build a city, and commence sieging other guild's cities. How can you go wrong with a concept like that?

Shadowbane Screenshots


Interface

Unlike most games of this kind, Shadowbane is designed for play from a third-person perspective. Although not particularly intuitive, the interface is nicely customizable if you spend enough time reading the manual to figure out how things are adjusted. While you can zoom in to a first-person perspective, playing this way is cumbersome to say the least.

Movement is accomplished with right mouse button clicks, and incredibly, keyboard movement controls are not even optional. Another shocking oversight is that there is no way to make your character run with a toggle; to travel a large distance you must click, and click, and click, ad nauseam. About the only practical way to get from one island to another is to bribe a healer into summoning you, making Summon the most useful spell in the game. To make matters worse, pathing is so shoddy that you have to wonder if it even exists, meaning that your character will stop at every tree or other impassable object between where they were and where you clicked, ultimately forcing you to navigate around each one with still more clicks.

Expect to spend considerable time getting used to all this, even if you're a hardened gamer who moves with WASD controls in real life.

Graphics and Sound

Shadowbane is a fully 3D game, and while the graphics get the job done, they are not as spectacular as many of its more recent competitors. The world is seamless, there are day and night cycles, good shadows, and some relatively limited weather effects. It also has some decent foliage, terrain, spell effects, and modeling, even if it's not the bleeding edge of eye candy. Given the modest nature of Shadowbane visually, you'd expect to get good performance even on high settings, but unfortunately, using a system that exceeds the minimum requirements by a large margin, the game is sluggish and framerates are poor at the best of times.
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I rarely mention sound in games anyone because it has gotten so good in the last few years people have started to take it for granted. By comparison, the world of Shadowbane seems rather sparse on sound. The forests are eerily quiet and you won't hear any crickets cricketing, birds chirping, or footsteps crunching. The few sounds that are there get repetitive quickly and could use more variety.

Character Creation

Shadowbane, including the Rise of Chaos expansion, currently has 10 races, 4 basic classes, and scores of professions which offer a considerable amount of character customization. You can adjust a few simple things about your character's appearance, such as hair color and style, but the options are quite limited compared to most games of this kind. Of course, your appearance changes as you accumulate equipment anyway. One nifty feature is that some races actually grow larger as they get stronger.

Unfortunately, character creation is both a mystery and a gamble unless you spend a lot of time researching it before you start. You are given points which can be distributed over your character's statistics or spent on skill runes. Nothing wrong with some flexibility, but in Shadowbane it's way too easy to make bad choices early on that will make your character pretty much useless in the end game. Users frequently share stories about how badly they "gimped" their first character.

Although I can appreciate that the standard medieval fantasy races such as elves and dwarves are getting a bit tiresome, the races and classes in Shadowbane range from the mundane to the borderline absurd. During character creation you're told that humans are the most populous race in the land, but when you get in there you discover that, aside from a handful of NPCs, hardly anyone chooses to play a human, while there are Minotaurs, Centaurs, and goofy-looking winged "Aracoix" all over the place.

The Skill System

As you gain levels you are given skill points which you may spend in a variety of ways, and which can result in significant differences between two characters that would otherwise be quite similar. Like character creation, it's not hard to go wrong and give yourself some serious disadvantages. You can switch skill points around at a later date, but big changes are prohibitively expensive.

To train your skills you must find an appropriate trainer. Given all the professions in the game, and the fact that not all cities have a complete set of trainers, or trainers of a high enough level, characters are forced to glean information from other players about where their trainer is and run a virtual marathon or two.

Death

In the early stages of the game, the penalty for dying is quite mild. You respawn in your home city and must make the long jog back to where the action is. Once you graduate off newbie island, however, the cost of dying goes up substantially. From this point on, you lose experience, your equipment takes damage which must be repaired, and the contents of your inventory, including gold, is left on your corpse. Your corpse can be looted by anyone, so prepare yourself for some EverQuest-like corpse runs.

Newbie Island

Clearly a first level character wouldn't last long in the lawless world of guild conflict, especially considering that there are no restrictions whatsoever on who may attack who in Shadowbane. So instead of starting you out in such a potentially hostile environment, you begin by putting in your time on what has become known as "newbie island," where neither PvP nor high level characters are allowed. After killing enough monsters to get you to about 20th level, you graduate into one of the world's neutral cities. At this stage, if you go beyond the confines of the safehold, all bets are off.

This does make a certain amount of sense, particularly for players that are new to the game and need to adjust to the controls and learn the basics. The drawback is that even experienced players creating new characters must go through this routine, and although it could probably be accomplished in a single long day of hardcore grinding, it gets old very fast, mainly because the PvE aspect of the Shadowbane is, as I will now elaborate on, thoroughly uninspired.

Fighting Mobs

There are no quests in the game and you get no experience for killing other players, so battling mobs is the only way to work your character up. You will also notice that, after the first few levels, soloing is not really an option in Shadowbane, particularly if you are hunting monsters to gain oh-so-precious experience. This is because you get roughly the same amount of experience whether you kill a beast by yourself or in a group, and a group can take them out at a far greater rate than an individual. While this does force players into a certain amount of social interaction, it's also a real drag if you can't find a group of a similar level with room for you. Since the maximum group size is 10, it's not unusual to see an 11th or 12th player sitting idly near a full group waiting for a spot to open up. You'll also notice that, at certain hours on certain servers, a suitable group is impossible to find, leaving you with nothing to do.Another issue with the PvE is that, unlike most MMORPGs, the areas where the mobs spawn are an absurd distance from the cities where players spawn. It seems like the majority of the world is just empty terrain. If you don't know where you're going, you can run around for hours without encountering anything but trees. Even when you do know where you're going, the long run back to the group after dying, for example, is often a good enough reason by itself to call it a day and log off.

Adding to the frustration of leveling in the game is the fact that, once you are hunting in PvP land, you must be constantly looking over your shoulder for high level characters with nothing better to do than gank you and steal your loot. It's not unusual for a low level group to be wiped out entirely by a high level character which they probably won't see coming and wouldn't stand a chance against even if they did. In effect, it just makes the end game, which is why everyone is playing, that much harder to reach.

Fighting Other Players

As you ascend to the game's higher levels, the expectation is that your attention will shift from killing mobs to player versus player combat. At level 35 you must join a player guild or become an "errant" character that spawns at a random location whenever you die or re-enter the world, which is not good considering that there is nothing but a bank at most of these locations. This means that you have no choice but to get involved in the game's politics and the struggle for territorial domination.

It's at this point that the game starts to get interesting, but unfortunately, like most MMORPGs, PvP encounters are typically very imbalanced. Again, there are no level restrictions on PvP, so until you reach the games upper echelons, you will frequently find yourself confronted with opponents you have no hope whatsoever against.

All of this might be forgiven if the sieges were a little more engaging, but in practice they are a rather chaotic and potentially frustrating affair. The way challenges are made and times are arranged for the confrontation is truly innovative. Trebuchets, mangonels, and ballista, the available siege engines, are all immobile, but cleverly implemented.

One problem is that flying abilities are commonplace, which does tend to detract somewhat from whole purpose of fortifications and siege engines. Similarly, certain classes can turn invisible, teleport to anywhere on the mini-map, and so on, making most attempts at a quasi-organised strategy futile. Coupled with the lag that would appear to be unavoidable in clashes involving large numbers of players, siege events can deteriorate in mass confusion at an alarming rate.

Another concern is that building up a city is a more costly and time-consuming proposition than tearing one down. The same is true in real life, but it doesn't always make for a fun time in virtual reality. In Shadowbane you never really know whether your kingdom, regardless of your best efforts, will be nothing but ashes the next time you log on, especially if it has been a few days. On the other hand, unlike the average MMORPG, there is a definite sense of being able to win or lose in this game. There is nothing stopping one guild from conquering the world, so to speak, although it's not entirely clear what they would do after that.

The Bottom Line

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Shadowbane. I really wanted to love this game because it tries to achieve what so many gamers like myself crave; sieges with real consequences against human opponents - the need to, in effect, crush or be crushed. Unfortunately, as much as I love the concept, I hate the execution. There is hardly any aspect of Shadowbane that doesn't scream for improvement, beginning with, of all things, the severely lacking PvE level treadmill where you will inevitably put in the bulk of your game time, at first for experience, then later for gold. Sadly, it would take several articles this length to detail all the irritating problems that plague this game. For hardcore gamers that want unrestricted PvP and meaningful territorial conflict, it may worth the grief, especially considering that few other games are even attempting to do this at the moment. I suspect that the majority of casual gamers, however, won't make it through the 10 day trail, should they choose to download it, before dismissing Shadowbane as a game in which they can't be remotely competitive without investing excessive amounts of time.


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