User Rating: 8.2 | Shadowbane PC
If you're looking for a Player-vs-Player game with a political twist that gives players the freedom to set the rules, then Shadowbane is the game you've been looking for. A game over five years in the making, Shadowbane's premise has been made clear: Player-vs-Player fighting and city sieging are at its core. And while the game has a couple of problems that are currently keeping it from being perfect, the game generally very well addresses the idea of developing your character and keeping things fun. There are ten Races in Shadowbane, ranging from your common Human to Elves, Dwarves and even playable Minotaurs. There are also 18 Professions to be able to promote to once you reach level ten, your exact choices depending on whether you started your first ten levels as a Rogue, Healer, Mage or Fighter. On top of this are 26 "Disciplines", which enable your character to learn more specialized spells. Discipline availablility is limited by Profession and Race, and each character can select up to three for their character. This creates a daunting number of possibilities for character development. For information on each, check out Shadowbane's website. The interface takes some getting used to in the game. To its credit it's highly customizable, so you can configure your interface as you see fit. Changing the options requires you Control-Click on the chat window you wish to modify. You can set the font sizes, colors and types in the window, and what sort of chatter you want on each one. In this way, if a particular chat channel is getting annoying, or you want to separate one channel of chat from the others for easy recognition, you can set it by control-clicking on the window and following the prompts. Players can also make their own skins for the interface and import them into the game, although there are none freely distributed yet. On the fighting side of the game, casting classes have your typical mana resource to keep track of for when their Powers are casted. Melee characters in comparison have "weapon powers" that are very similar to the weapon styles you may recognize from Dark Age of Camelot. These are swings that cost the melee character extra stamina to execute, but do increased damage as well as some side effects, such as one weapon power slowing an enemy's attack speed for a few seconds, one slowing their run speed, one stunning them, one making them more vulnerable to certain types of damage, among other things. There are levels in Shadowbane, but the "treadmill" of past MMOGs is shortened considerably; a "casual" gamer can attain a competitive level for combat in a matter of weeks instead of months. Profession balance in Shadowbane is surprisingly well-done for being so early in the game's release. However, do not think that every class can fight every class one-on-one. As Shadowbane is a group-oriented fighting game, each of their Professions is more importantly designed according for what they bring to that group. For instance, while Priests aid melee classes by healing them, "buffing" them (casting temporary character enhacements) and stunning enemies, they can rarely do much damage and must rely on their groupmates to defeat what they're after. Confessors, while being able to both heal others and deal damage with offensive spells, can not heal as well as a Priest and cannot do more magical damage than a Wizard. Wizards can deal out a great deal of damage, but are frail and cannot take many hits before dying. Thieves can stealth invisible and steal from characters, but can be spotted and revealed to the world by Scouts. You will find that there is no "best" Profession, but simply Professions with different playstyles that are best for different people. Graphically, Shadowbane is nothing to write home about. Through its five years of development, Wolfpack realized that during city sieging and large-scale player-vs-player engagements, there are a lot of characters and a lot of items on-screen at once. With this much information to process, a grand graphical engine would spell immense slowdowns every time enemies met, and so steps had to be taken to make Shadowbane look beautiful while making sure it wasn't too elaborate to keep the on-screen lag down. The animations in the game are very fluid however, easily topping Dark Age of Camelot's character animations in running and especially in fighting. Your character begins on a "newbie", non-PvP oriented island in which you can safely get used to the game's interface and controls. After Level 10, you can use any of the starting village's runemasters to repledge to the main PvP land to engage in higher-level activity, or you can choose to remain in the non-PvP land until Level 20, when you are forcibly removed. After this, you can either join one of three NPC-controlled mainland cities until level 35, or join a player-run guild, the latter of which is usually your most "fun" option. Player-run guilds are able to build their own cities with a "Tree of Life" seed. This Tree gives protection to up to ten buildings around it so that any raiders you may run into cannot simply run in and destroy them. Using Builders and Stewards (Two different NPCs), contracts can be purchased for merchants and deeds for workshops and these placed within the guild's city limits. Among these are Barracks which train city guards. These guards can be assigned to kill a specific individual, a guild, or an entire nation on sight, which is necessary for defending yourselves against hostile players and guilds. The guild itself is in charge of managing both the finances and the protection for their cities. The player-vs-player combat system can be a little overwhelming however for people that are used to the way Everquest and much of Dark Age of Camelot plays. In Shadowbane, outside of the NPC-controlled cities, anyone may attack you, and you may attack anyone freely. This also holds true in Guild-run cities. Your protection against this is supplied by your guild leadership, which must take political steps to help make sure their members are safe from other guilds that they want no trouble with. Or, through your guild's swift and harsh reaction to any enemies of yours, sending a message not to mess with you. Death can be fairly harsh in Shadowbane as well, as your equipment takes damage and can break when you are killed. Fortunately, your character doesn't lose experience if you're killed in a PvP fight, but any unequipped items stay on your corpse and can be looted by anyone. Obviously though, if you are a part of a group that is attacking an enemy, you will have nothing overly important in your inventory anyway. Unfortunately, Shadowbane has suffered from a couple of problems that have held it back. By far though, the most crucial are lag and client compatibility issues, especially the former. The release for Shadowbane went surprisingly smooth until the servers began getting more populated, after which some problems arose with in-game server-side lag and crashing. Wolfpack has been making sound attempts to fix these problems however. There are also some compatibility problems with the client for some users, particularly those using Windows 98 Second Edition and problems with those using Radeon video cards. My personal system uses a Radeon 9700 pro, and although I had graphic glitches when I first started the game up, Wolfpack supplies a downloadable configuration utility that solved my problems. Be sure to check out Shadowbane's public forums for any possible compatibility problems with your system. Despite this though, Shadowbane has succeeded in creating a highly customizable game tailored not around the players' ability to work with rules, but the ability of player guilds to set these rules and play to them themselves. There is enough capacity for player accountability among a guild to offset most, if not all possible types of "griefing" in the game. This is finally the game that guilds looking for player-vs-player action have been looking for. If you want a game where your guild as an entity can mean more than a name, you've found it here.