Shadowbane

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating political sim -- players need to be fixed
Review: Shadowbane is truly fascinating in its political dimension. If you've never experienced true power, work hard and you may achieve it in this game. You can rise to run a city of hundreds or thousands of other players. What it takes to get to the top is probably one of the most fascinating game play experiences ever.

The problem is the players. 90%+ are really not the sort of people you'd want to spend time with. There is a small population of troublemakers and predators. As unwholesome and unpleasant as these people are, they make the game work -- providing a fear factor that keeps the rest of the players under your thumb. Most of the rest of the players are without creativity, rather dull, petty, heavy consumers of resources which they inevitably waste through mismanagement of their own affairs. Finally there is a very small fraction of talented, interesting people that will help you build your empire. These are diamonds in the coal.

Player vs. Player combat tends to be short, but exciting. Ubisoft hasn't done a very good job of making these large battles run well on modest computers. Expect to just die because you can't see or act due to computer CPU overtaxation unless you have the very latest game machine. Since these events are rare and can generally be avoided, the game is still playable by mere mortals. You can go hunting, explore, investigate the game system. The character classes and rank progression are reasonably rich. There is a lore behind the game that a number of people advance in their role play. Hunting is without a doubt the dullest of any game.

Many players will tell you that player vs. player combat is the point of SB. It isn't. Politics is. PvP is just politics by other means.

Rating:
Summary: Ignore the Negative Reviews ...
Review: Sure, Shadowbane had a bad rough start. So did allot of other MMORPGs. The pressure was on Wolfpack (The developers) from not only Ubi (The distributor) but the public to release the game.
They not only released a PC version but also a Mac version for those sorry souls that dont have any games on their system anyway. (lol).

The games graphics arent spectacular because the game is solely CPU dependant. Its 3D hardware acceleration was not implemented at the time it was being created.

People with slow CPUs were able to run the game however the CPU was left to handle the graphics, the physics, the animations, everything!

Just recently in patch 2.0 Wolfpack is now moving into 3D acceleration and are now introducing the first update to their graphics.

heres a snippet:

"One of the performance problems we found with Shadowbane was that our client was solely CPU bound. To improve overall game performance, we are slowly moving some graphical features and processes to utilize the user's video card / GPU instead of the CPU. These moves will improve Shadowbane's overall performance and experience quality, especially for users with higher-end video cards.

The Shadowbane team is still working on these changes, so more and more graphical features and processes will begin taking advantage of the GPU instead of the CPU exclusively. In the end this will drastically improve game client performance."

Should you buy the game now? Why not? its only $4.99.
if you dont want to then goto shadowbane.com and download a trial version.

Give it a go. You'll like it.

By the way, the 2.0 patch isnt live on the regular servers just yet so if you want to see it you have to logon to the test server.

Rating:
Summary: Don't bother unless you have a few dozen friends
Review: The game is fun, if you have a few dozen friends already ingame to watch over you. While the game protects players until level 20, you don't become viable in any of the serious combat situations until level 50. With experience, you can hit level 50 in a week; however, if you just start the game, it could take you close to a solid month.

This is not a light gaming experience at all. If you're looking for an MMOG to try out just for the sake of trying it out, I suggest City of Heroes or Dark Age of Camelot. Shadowbane is "advanced" MMOG gaming. It requires you like hunting and being hunted by other people, at all times and in all places, and being comfortable ending the playsession further behind than where you started.

That's why I gave it 2 stars. It's not a good all-around title. It's fun for a very specific type of player.

Rating:
Summary: Buggy, Laggy, Nice Ideas
Review: The whole point of this game is guild vs. guild warfare, mass sieges and epic battles with hundreds of participants.

Unfortunately, the engine just can't support that many players. Server side lag is simply far too high, even compared to other games. The result is unplayable. There are also frequent client crashes, world crashes, and login server problems. In fact, the first sieges in the game were marred by these to the point where some guilds feel their cities fell solely because of bugs in the game.

It's a pity. They got a great deal right with this game. The gameplay is fun. The levelling pace is brisk. Guild and city politics are interesting. And at first I was quite impressed. But when you get to "the real game" of epic sieges, the game is just not capable of delivering. There are also issues of play balance, particularly with huge "beta guilds" (guilds that came to the game from other games and have extensive experience from beta testing the game) dominating servers.

Check back in Fall of 03 and see whether they've fixed things. There's some good stuff here being smothered by a bad laggy game engine.

Rating:
Summary: Very nice game, better than any other MMORPG out there.....
Review: Well, I heard a lot about this game, and looked at a lot of reviews and screenies for it, and decided it was a good lookin game. So i decided to try it. This was a long time ago and im still playing. This game is still fresh and addicting!

You start off with the character creation screen, adding points and runes that affects your characters disciplines and skills for future times. You can pick a bunch of different races and 4 different classes which lead off into tons more when you hit lvl 10 and have to choose ur path. So you make your character and start off by noticing how everything on your interface is customizable! This is a great feature when you need to get stuff out of the way and move things around. The first few lvls are easy to gain by yourself but then you're going to need a group to level faster. once you leave the .:"Noob Isle":. (at lvl 20), you will need to join a guild. Finding guilds are rather easy. Just making your own guild is hard. If you want to do this, you need to probably need to be level cap, and you also need TONS of money. Once you are in a guild or have your own guild managed, you'll notice that you'll eventually have some enemy and allied guilds. You can go to war with other guilds and slaughter each other in the process. Losing is a very bad thing to happen. you lose your guild =( but most of the time that doesnt even happen. Thats about all i have to unleash. If you want to know more about this game, feel free to email me ([e-mail]) . I might post more later.

Well ive given ya the basics of the game. Lvling, meeting new peeps, and going guild v guild. The political activity in this game is all around you. Watch for it. you'll see what i mean.

But to summarize this review, its a great game, and i think a lot of people should play it. Well peace

Rating:
Summary: Very nice game, better than any other MMORPG out there.....
Review: Well, I heard a lot about this game, and looked at a lot of reviews and screenies for it, and decided it was a good lookin game. So i decided to try it. This was a long time ago and im still playing. This game is still fresh and addicting!

You start off with the character creation screen, adding points and runes that affects your characters disciplines and skills for future times. You can pick a bunch of different races and 4 different classes which lead off into tons more when you hit lvl 10 and have to choose ur path. So you make your character and start off by noticing how everything on your interface is customizable! This is a great feature when you need to get stuff out of the way and move things around. The first few lvls are easy to gain by yourself but then you're going to need a group to level faster. once you leave the .:"Noob Isle":. (at lvl 20), you will need to join a guild. Finding guilds are rather easy. Just making your own guild is hard. If you want to do this, you need to probably need to be level cap, and you also need TONS of money. Once you are in a guild or have your own guild managed, you'll notice that you'll eventually have some enemy and allied guilds. You can go to war with other guilds and slaughter each other in the process. Losing is a very bad thing to happen. you lose your guild =( but most of the time that doesnt even happen. Thats about all i have to unleash. If you want to know more about this game, feel free to email me ([e-mail]) . I might post more later.

Well ive given ya the basics of the game. Lvling, meeting new peeps, and going guild v guild. The political activity in this game is all around you. Watch for it. you'll see what i mean.

But to summarize this review, its a great game, and i think a lot of people should play it. Well peace

Rating:
Summary: Greatly improved by newest patches
Review: When I started this game, it was virtually unplayable. Now it is one of the best online games I've ever seen.

Shadowbane really has pushed the envelope into the realm i've bee waiting for all these years, a true, player-run, non-scripted environment. My group has just broken off from our main guild and started to form our own city. Let me tell you, city-building is incredibly fun and rewarding.

Yes, it can be frustrating to get constantly PKed during that time between Newbie Island and Level 50+, but the key there is to join a guild. Often guild leaders recruit from newbie groups while they are leveling their alternate characters.

Random bits:
Scorn is typically the PK/PvP server. Many dispute that since the rise of the anti-Pker nation (Reborn), but I believe it is still a great, active server on many fronts.

Mourning has the reputation as the Roleplayer server, where there are actually Elves only and Dwaves only guilds and the like.

As for the other servers, I haven't played there, so I couldn't tell you. I highly suggest going to [the website] and checking out the different server forums to help you decide where to go. Just remember, on forums, complainers speak more often than happy people.