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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?
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.
I have never actually heard of this MMO, so I guess perhaps marketing fail on their part.
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!
Well, the competition is failing to take away WoW's marketshare. I don't think WoW is so terribly unique that there's no way anybody could ever make a competitor that will beat it but it doesn't look like the competition has any clue how to make one.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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!
Fighting for scraps? Not really, when you consider those "scraps" would have been considered major successes in the pre-WoW days- 200k subscribers was thought to be a high end number. There's plenty of room in the MMO market and quite a few thriving MMOs- you just have to find a niche that's not "Generic fantasy PvE MMO" because WoW has that sewed up. Lord of the Rings Online is doing well based on the lore and built in story, WAR and AoC are contracting but there's a market for the PvP oriented games, and EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
What they mean by "true PvP" is that unlike in every other MMO out there, the cities were player-made and player-run. Player-made cities were the only place to get the top-end gear and player-made cities were the only place where you could train your characters to full. And in Shadowbane, you could destroy other people's cities.
That's where the real draw was. In practice you never lost much when your character died, but to lose the city you and your guild built was truly devastating. People fought tooth and nail to protect their cities, and it lead to some truly amazing wars. It's the type of large scale PvP I've yet to see replicated elsewhere.
EVE is doing well in the "economic simulation for psychopaths" arena
I object to this ignorant oversimplification of EVE's player demographic. I have absolutely no interest in economic simulations!
Uh, nerfing is different from the developers favouring one guild/team over the rest.
If you don't get it, here's a car analogy from you.
Nerfing is telling the race car teams that from now on they have to use a certain sort of tyres, or reduce downforce.
Sure it might affect some teams more than others, but it applies to all teams.
Corruption and cheating is when you allow one team to get inside info or resources that they are not supposed to have. For example they get a tip off from the race organizers what the other teams plans are for the upcoming race.
Mods can mod me troll all they want, but that sort of thing sure appears to happen in Eve more than the other popular MMOGs. Just google for the various eve scandals.