Reviews / previews
Many years in the making, Shadowbane is Wolfpack Studios pride and joy. Conceptualized as a player-versus-player game from the start, Shadowbane has been shackled with the reputation as a grief-players paradise, where casual gamers have to fear being randomly squashed by higher-level characters who are just out to ruin someones day.
A look past the reputation shows that Shadowbane will be much more than just a chance to kill folks. First off, Shadowbane will feature one of the deepest and most interesting back-stories in gaming, let alone in online gaming. A war versus the humans and the elves ended in a shattered world, and 90 years later, you have to help in rearranging the pieces. Theres more to it than that, but youll want to read it yourself. You can find most of the story and more back-story details at shadowbane.com.
Unlike other MMORPGs, in which you pretty much wander in a world thats created for you, Shadowbane will allow large, successful guilds to create and run their own towns. According to Wolfpack, the best and busiest towns in the game will be player-created and player-run. If youre good enough, youll be able to establish shops in a town by hiring craftsmen and laborers and telling them how much to buy, how much to make, and how much to sell items for. Plus, the ruling guild of the town will reap taxes from the established businesses. It will be in that guilds best interest to keep its citizens happy because if theyre not pleased with the leadership, theyll be able to find another city to patronize.
The most interesting thing about Shadowbane will be its PvP system. While anyone can kill anyone else in the game (except for newbies level 20 and lower who are located within a GM-created city), the victim of random violence will be able to return to town and report his own murder to the town guards. That towns guildmaster will then be able to place the entire town on alert against the characters murderer so that when the criminal tries to enter the city to shop, rest, or whatever, the guards will attack him on sight. The guildmaster will also be able to contact the king of the murderers hometown and ask him to tell the griefer to knock it off, lest the towns slide into war. The idea of accountability for player killing isnt entirely new, but Wolfpack is pulling out all the stops to have PvP action without grief.
The idea of being able to get revenge on other players for things they did to you is attractive, but the ultimate goal of Shadowbane will be to have humungous city sieges and gigantic guild wars to mirror the epic battles of heroic fantasy. According to the developers, sieges will take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to complete and weeks or months before that to plan and prepare. The stakes will be high, though: If the attackers win, the defenders will lose their home city, and their guild will be disbanded; if the defenders win, the attackers will have lost tons of resources and gained a powerful new enemy in the victorious defenders. This sort of large-scale PvP combat has been attempted in Dark Age of Camelot and Anarchy Online, but Shadowbane hopes to take it even further.
Please note that the screen shots are early visions of what the game looks like now. Wolfpacks policy has been to get the nuts and bolts working first, and then add dazzle and graphical flair later. It has a lot of ground to make up to compete with such games as Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, and Asherons Call 2, but it already looks like Shadowbane will be a player-versus-player fans paradise when it ships later this year.-- 0 / GamePro
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