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Ubisoft To Shut Down Shadowbane
tyen writes "Ubisoft has announced the shutdown of Shadowbane, the first major, fantasy role-playing MMO with true PVP (full asset destruction possible). The shutdown will take place in about two weeks, at the start of May. No official reason has been given by Ubisoft, but running an MMO for free for the past three years, with no significant improvement in market growth during that period, could play a part in the decision. There's been no response from Ubisoft yet on calls to open source the code. "
I played it for about a year and a half when it was new. It had a pretty decent following though nothing anywhere near the level of something like WoW.
It was really fun though especially during a "bane". For those who didn't play, a bane was when you effectively declared war on someone else's city. Once set up, each side was given a set amount of time to prepare (like a day or a week or something, I forget) and then once it went off, all of the town's buildings were vulnerable and if you destroyed their tree of life, their town was taken over by the other team. Shadowbane wasn't about gold, loot or missions though there was plenty of that. It was about full on guild vs guild battles. I've never really found a MMO with quite the same experience. So this is very sad for me even though I have no time to play a game like this anyway.
Ultimately, I think it was killed by griefers, people who didn't like PvP leaving the game and constant crashing that they didn't fully fix until about the time I stopped playing.
Because it was released 6 years ago. It was a novel game for it's time. A lot of original elements in the game. The mechanics of it were pretty fun. Unfortunately the game had tons of problems, bugs, class balance issues, and severe lag also. Large scale combat would frequently overload the servers and make it impossible to do anything. At most probably only 100 players per side was sort of okay. But at that time, it was fairly common for battles to have upwards of 200-300 people, per side. That was due to the formation of alliances among guilds, and some guilds managing to attain a large membership, over a thousand players. Once people had been driven away by all the bugs, exploits and other issues, the game never recovered. I came back years later and it was pretty much empty. Another victim of an "early" launch. A few more months, and more testing and it could have been much better.
Trecares