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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. "
Could there be any reason aside from lack of revenue generation?
Unchecked PvP where you lose your stuff is what destroyed Lineage 2. Shadowbane didn't invent the idea. My guess is that it helped destroy Shadowbane too.
In L2 they started things out with pvpers being on the short end of the stick for almost a year, by flagging them red and letting non-pvpers kill them without turning pvp themselves. It was a really good system and I'd like to see another game use it as well. At some point, they decided to turn this off to allow massacres to take place.
This is the point at which twinking started to have a direct effect on others. When people "twink", e.g. buy virtual currency to make their character godlike, people who are playing honestly can't enjoy it anymore. It didn't really matter a whole lot when pvpers were the target of roving groups of non-pvpers. However, when they turned the system off, now the non-pvpers were hunted.
If I've been working hard for months to get really expensive armor and weapon and someone who twinked comes up and slaughters me and laughs about it, how long do you think I'm going to keep playing? And, how long is that game really viable for?
the market is not flooded. It's dominated by one major force that has huge shares and everybody else is fighting for scraps.
Whether or not WOW is worth the share it has is another question, but it's the number one reason why there's so little room.
Why is it I only find out about these free mmorpg's just as they shut down?
Wub
Sit... Speak.... Shake.... Good Dog!
I once hit up a friend of mine for a job who worked at Shadowbane's developer, Wolfpack Studios. I was hoping to work on the back end database. Turned out they didn't have a formal rdbms behind the game. All player data, etc. was stored in flat files. I offered to help migrate them to a more reliable, higher performance database architecture, but they weren't interested. I think the lifecycle of the product had moved beyond architecture development and they only had the budget for ongoing maintenance (circa 2003).
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Shadowbane's group v group combat was very interesting. Unfortunately it was about the only thing worthwhile about the game. The completely open nature of pvp did make running around solo or in small groups a pain in the ass, and there was massive class disparity. But there was just something about 10 v 10 group combat that no other game has seemed to get the same. One of my fondest memories of the game was when my guild was defending a mine. We had one priest, one bard, and 8 crossbow warriors. One guy would call out a target and all the crossbowmen would skewer the target. We held off three consecutive groups that way.
The only other thing that I liked was the extremely flexible nature of character classes. A single class could have many different viable builds, each one drastically different. The same class could be a super-high defense low damage tank, a high-damage decent defense melee dps, or a decent ranged nuker. Some of the builds were in fact completely unintentional and only came about due to experimentation.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Shadowbane is, to this day, the only MMO I ever enjoyed. Without a robust PvP model like Shadowbane had, no other MMO seems worth the hassle (or the $15/month).