Slashdot Mirror
Shadowbane Now Free As In Beer
Gamaustra reports on the decision by Shadowbane developer Wolfpack to make their PvP MMOG title free for the taking. From the article: "Despite the growing acceptance of [the no monthly fee] revenue model, it's not yet certain that it's the one Ubisoft has chosen for Shadowbane; the announcement makes no reference to any alternate form of revenue for the title. In-game advertising has also been an option for allowing free play in titles including Funcom's Anarchy Online, but Shadowbane's fantasy setting may preclude contemporary ads. The company indicated that a more detailed explanation of the free-to-play scheme will follow shortly."
According to http://www.shadowbane.com/, Shadowbane supports both Mac and PC. I'm going to have to check this out. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a Linux version.
Best PvP game evar as long as you dont mind LAg from hell and GM sanctioned cheats ,hacks, exploits galore. I always said I would go back to this game when they made it free to play. But the last trial I took was so buggy it was near unplayable and then Guild Wars came out.
They need to release the source code for the client so that we can clean up the UI and fix that damn click to move. Not to mention the stability issues.
Yea its a semi-shameless post, but you can download it here free, no subscription, no lines, no bullshit: http://www.filenuts.com/1055.html
Like Ebaums World? You'll love Shizzville
Are there any other MMOPG (i know this is off topic a little) that are like elite (other than eve online), and that are preferably free? I was told once that there was one, open source too, yet never found it! nevermind
... all four people who still play the game.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does it still come with free SB.EXE crash errors? :P Nothing like playing for a few more minutes with an sb.exe error window up. Once you click it *then* it crashes for ya.
On my server one guild destroyed every major guild on the server and most of the small ones. They seiged and burnt most guild towns to the ground. A lot of people quit after seeing months of work go up in smoke. I was in a 500 man pvp guild and we couldn't stop them. When I left the server was dead... only 3 to 4 months after the release date.
Can be found here: http://www.mininova.org/tor/254209
Wow, i had a buttload of +40 runes laying in the bank of my farmerdruid when I quit playing that game, I too said i would consider going back when it was free, maybe I should do just that and see if my stash is intact. :)
Devil bunnies! I snort the nose! Lucifer! Banana! Banana!
They start paying you to play it. As it is , being free still costs too much for that game as I remember it.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I've been bouncing around MMORPG's recently to build up experience with them, and I still haven't found one (Besides Puzzle Pirates) that seems worth sticking with.
Is Shadowbane worth playing? Is the start-up investment of time in the character low enough that it is worth trying, or is it one that you need to invest a million hours in the game before the actual game starts?
What about Legend of Mir II? Any free or pay MMORPG's that people would recommend as must-trys?
The ______ Agenda
Every script kiddie with a compiler would be hacking the game. You've seen how messy online games can get when they're closed-source, and you're suggesting they open up an MMO?
Crazy talk.
Duh? Let them hack the client if they want, if you know anything about coding you'll secure the server as well, and the "script kiddies" will have some trouble "hacking" the server since you are running it, not them.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
http://www.shadowbane.com/ - Flash page, the only link for news leads to:
http://chronicle.ubi.com/ - looks like they're preparing for new & returning players and there's a community announcement about their billing system. The announcement dances around some kind of big change, but their Community Manager isn't authorized to give any details. There's some offhand conjecture in the forum. Nothing else.
http://www.ubisoft.com/ - Press? Nothing there.
Did it get retracted? Maybe I'm missing something.
I discovered Fly For Fun, a free Chinese (Korean?) MMORPG. Nice graphics, music, and gameplay speed. I quit after a few hours because it consisted of slaughtering the same enemies over and over to gain levels, but it was fun for a while.
Correction: the Gamasutra article clearly states that the decision was made by the publisher, Ubisoft. Remember, in the world of game development, publishers and developers are different entities!
Yea, they couldn't do anything like make walls transparent or display mini-Map data (like loot, monsters, hostile players, etc) or make an auto-aim bot or macro up a farming bot.. Since you know, your "super secure magical" server renders all the graphics and then pipes it to the client and since you got massive fat network pipes (and all player also!) you don't have to send all the map data, but just keep refreshing only the players line of view. You can detect macros by sending a .jpg image (of text) for every action required and have players type that data in and you could ban anyone that gets "really good" at combat since no skilled human could have a 80% kill rate on other players.
Your right. Release the source to the client because Open Source is magically secure.
Shadowbane definitely had stability issues when it first came out, but it had other MMORPGs beat when it game to gameplay concepts.
There were so many times playing WoW I wished there were player-built cities that leveled and grew. That there were Feature Characters (Hired Actors) acting out in-game events that regularly involved different server factions. That gear was not the deciding factor in PvP, but a balanced and organized group. If the WoW engine could have been applied to the Shadowbane world, that would be MMORPG Nirvana. After all, Blizzard should know something about the RTS aspect of city building.
Developers of the Next Big Thing could learn a lot from Shadowbane. The stability drove people away, not the game play concepts. Sure, I faced having a city almost burnt to the ground and it sucked, but my guild was strong and we bided our time. Many 'homeless' guilds had an even more interesting experience, changing sides in the middle of battle for gold or just treason. Even the server boards offered political 'gameplay' as interesting as the game at times.
My Best Gaming Moment Ever was not beating some single player game, or hitting level 60, or anything else. It was the night my guild, Verikai, laid siege to Clan Havion's main city and drove them from the desert, beginning the process of uniting the desert under our Irekei banner. Not a game yet has matched that feeling of accomplishment.
We're talking about an RPG here, not a FPS, this is not much of an issue. Much less than in, say, CS.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
This is too much fun:
From a discussion of free Shadowbane on BluesNews:
Some dude: "My question still stands, have you guys eradicated the sb.exe crash bug?"
Wolfpack community manager: "No, we have not... [but] we have drastically reduced the number of client crashes. I play Shadowbane nightly and haven't had one for well over a week."
A whole week? AMAZING! Imagining their code... I giggle.
No, I'm saying your right... the server should DO EVERYTHING THAT IT CAN. But it can't.
How are you going to RENDER GRAPHICS on the server and get them to the client unmodified? Please tell.
How are you going to get the player map and monster information with LIMITED bandwidth and resource?
Secondly bots will be huge. Give me access to a closed source client and I can either create a macro to play with the GUI or I can create a "proxy" that modifies incoming/outgoing packets.... or given the source code I could strip out the GUI, create a light weight console application, borg it out on every library, college, cyber cafe, work computer and freinds computers that I can and have 50+ gold bots raping your "secure server" and have them all interlinked and drop off gold into any account I choice. Accounts are free, so I could flood all your servers to max capticy with my bots.
I agree, for a game like this you need to do it on the server. But some things you can. Secondly, it would make programming a bot 100% simplier if I could work directly with the source instead of hacking the client, writing a clumsy macro or modify the packets (assuming the packets aren't encrpted).
With Open Source, ANY application is easier to work with. Both for the good guys AND the bad guys. I would hack Microsoft Word to read in my own custom document format (saves everything in ROT14), but it would be a ton easier for me if I had direct access to it's source.