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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
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.
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
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.
Ah, I am missing something indeed. In my defense, it was well hidden by the official news site.
http://mmorpgdot.com/#46951 links to http://chronicle.ubi.com/newspost.php?id=15088, which does indeed confirm free play. Weird. I wonder why that post doesn't appear in the news index.
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.