April 30, 2009

Goodbye, Shadowbane
By: Michael Lafferty

After six years, PvP-centric MMO closes

The bell was tolling its demise for years, but Shadowbane never listened to it. The massively multiplayer online game went through several changes, but the dev teams kept the game going – and that, more than anything else – is a tribute to not only the developers, to the publisher but also to the community that made the land of Aerynth both an exciting and deadly place.

The game launched on March 25, 2003. It was developed by Wolfpack Studios and published by UbiSoft. Wolfpack was sold to Ubi a year later and a new live team and dev team was brought on board. Though the game was a regular target of the media as hovering on the edge of its demise, it persevered.

Shadowbane was notable for several reasons. First, it was one of the first massively multiplayer online games that was mostly player-versus-player based. Second, players could actually affect the world – meaning that rather than a static world, the land of Aerynth was constantly being affected by the players and changed.

It could be a harsh place, but for the hardcore faithful, it was indeed a world worth fighting for. On the fifth anniversary of the game, Shadowbane was relaunched as Shadowbane Reboot, originally with two servers but it expanded to three due to the size of the population. The ‘reboot’ was intended to address many issues, with client stability at the forefront.

Why the retrospective? On May 1st Shadowbane will be closing, and the sun will set for the final time on the community and world.

While there is certainly sadness associated with the closure of the game, there should also be a time to joyfully remember the world, the adventures and the camaraderie of its community.

As an MMOer who has seen games much enjoyed closed, it is hard to say goodbye to a game where a lot of time has been invested. But the MMO market is a business – a business marketing one product, and when the product begins to wane, companies – who have payrolls to meet and stockholders to satisfy – have to make hard decisions.

Still, there must be a tip of the hat to the development teams who labored long and hard to create a sustainable product. It’s not easy to create an MMO in the first place, nor is it a cakewalk to counter player hacks, keep the content lively and fresh and counter problems as they arise. Sometimes, when fixing one problem, you break something else. There was an instance in Lineage II once where the dev team worked hard to fix a bug that allowed players to duplicate everything in their inventories. The idea, of course, was to dup everything, then sell off the dups and earn coin faster. On one particular night, the dev team thought they had the solution and brought down the servers for a short time period. As the promised time, the servers were rebooted with the tiny patch in place. Within five minutes, players were broadcasting in global chat how to get around the fix and still dup inventory items.

That is an example of what dev teams and live teams contend with. Many players don’t look for hacks, but there are those that do.

The fact that Shadowbane lasted six years is also noteworthy. Some MMOs don’t last that long. One of my favorite MMOs, the one that really hooked me in the genre, Asheron’s Call 2, was closed just after it’s third anniversary. Tabula Rasa lasted 15 months.

So don’t really mourn the passing of Shadowbane, but rather celebrate the fact that it was, and cherish the times spent in battle, adventures, and with online friends.
 

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