I know, I was just as surprised as you are. Shadowbane, the notHit MMO from 2003, is back and released on Steam last week.
Hailing from the time when MMO's were the brave new frontier of gaming, Shadowbane brings intriguing mechanics to the genre, like
Character Customization: One of the two unique pillars of Shadowbane, this is the one that gripped me when the game came out. Unlike launch WoW, or SWTOR, or other MMO's, your character was more than your class, your race went far beyond your appearance, and your prestige class meant more than a talent tree. Character building in Shadowbane begins with a simple choice, your race. Beyond choosing your looks though, this determined your starting stats, your stat caps, and your available basic class. Each race also came with certain racial traits, both positive and negative. Each character gets 30 freebie points at creation, to spend on stat increases, or runestones that could give you stat bonuses, or even entire skills you wouldn't have access to, like the ability to dual wield (RIP Rekthar, the dual-wielding axe throwing Half-Giant Barbarian). However, every race cost a number of your freebie points (A Centaur, for example, takes 10 of your 30 points), except for humans, who not only did not cost points but also gave you 1 extra point per level up.
So your race is chosen, which then determines what basic class you can select: Fighter, Healer, Rogue, Mage. Your starting class will determine your beginning skills. These skills range from armor types and weapon types to schools of magic, like Liturgy or Benediction. You even have skills like Dodge, Parry, Bargaining, Running, Athletics, and Toughness. In total, there are 57 Skills in the game. But there's more! At level 10, you then choose your prestige class. This is where your choice of race and base class combine to determine what you can promote to. But guess what? Many classes can be chosen from multiple base classes. You could be a Mage Bard, or a Rogue Bard. You could be a Mage Warlock or a Fighter Warlock (Yeah you heard that, a melee base class with a caster promotion). There are 22 prestige classes.
Beyond that, you have three discipline slots that you can fill as you play the game. What you can equip is determined by your race and class. The disciplines are another layer of specialization (or hybridization, depending on your goals). These are akin to WoW professions or SWTOR crew skills, except they are not crafting skills, but could be more aptly described as mini-classes. Taking the Saboteur disc, for example, gives you abilities like stealth (Which is helpful if you aren't a rogue) and untrackability, a personal teleport, and the ability to shut down siege equipment during a bane. Or, you could take the Wererat disc, which, well, you can guess. These disc can also grant skills you may not be able to access otherwise. There are 48 of these disciplines.
So, you have 12 races, with 22 classes, 55 skills, combining to create your character. As you can see from these numbers alone, this is a staggering amount of choice in how you want to craft your character. Indeed, you can roll two characters, with the same race, base class, prestige class, and disciplines. But if you choose to train different skills on those characters, they can play entirely differently from one another. This was one of the biggest things that drew me to the game back in the day. When it comes to conflict between players, the classes of Shadowbane are definitely built on the idea of rock paper scissors. A Thief can demolish Warriors that depend on their armor alone. Scouts are some of the fastest characters, have the best tracking, can beat out anybody's stealth (Indeed, the only way to get a drop on a good scout is to be a scout yourself). With 22 classes, no matter what someone chooses, there are people they can take on, and others they should avoid.
The other pillar was the focus of the game: PvP. Or more specifically: PvP beyond random free for alls and ganking. Before warzones, Shadowbane said "What if we let players build entire cities for their guilds? And then let them wage war with each other?" Shadowbane was a game of politics, overshadowed only by EVE in scope. Your guild could claim rule over an entire zone, collecting taxes from other cities in the zone, wage wars against bitter rivals, or simply open your gates to everyone and rake in gold as players come and go, buying what they need from your crafters.
The political aspect of Shadowbane is beyond intriguing. Guilds could be attack on sight, simply because one person had killed another during leveling, and the victim held a grudge. Wealer guilds could pay tribute, hoping to convince larger guilds to ignore them and throw a bane on someone else (Banes were Shadowbane's method of setting the terms for large scale conflict. An attacker would put a bane on a defender's city, meaning it could be attacked and destroyed, but the defending city go to choose the time when the bane would be active, ensuring they couldn't be targetted at a time that they were mostly offline).
Shadowbane's main focus, from day one, was player conflict. The game tracks who you kill, who killed you, has a pvp channel that announces deaths as they happen. Hell, there's an entire class whose big hook is stealing from other people's inventories. Your inventory can be looted from your body (Thankfully, you don't need to actually carry anything on you, so it would be anything you have looted, and if you loot something you really want to keep, you can use a recall scroll to immediately get back to town and throw your treasure in your bank).
Now, having heaped praise on the game, Shadowbane has some actual, real issues that are totally justifiable in not bothering with the game, such as
Click to move
Edge-scrolling camera control only, by default (I've rebound this to WASD)
Just, the worst graphics. Seriously, it looked bad on release and it hasn't gotten better
An arcane engine built specifically for this game. It has atrocious draw distance, everything is covered in a fog to cover that, and hills and mountains are sudden 90 degree terrain changes that your character just glides across no problem
Inventory loot on death. Yeah, this goes on the negative too, cause a lot of people just don't like that. Though there's a good chance if looting on death is a dealbreaker for you, most of this game will be
The UI. My god, the UI. It looks bad, the default layout is pants-on-head, and you need to alter it to get the information you actually want on the screen. Worse, it doesn't scale to modern resolutions. So it can be difficult to read your status bar numbers because the text is tiny, thanks to it remaining the same size at 2880X1620 that is was at 800X600
Obfuscation of information. What does STR do? Well, if you check your character sheet in game, you aren't going to be told. Luckily, the stats are basic and easy to figure out (STR, DEX, CON, INT, SPR). The bigger issue with lack of information is that you won't know what race or classes give access to what skills. Luckily, as the game is 20 years old, and has had emulators running for years, there's a wiki for that. A wiki that just so happens to be using the same map and build as the Steam version.
Shadowbane is an almost 20 year old game filled with arcane game design choices, dated graphics and gameplay, and a core of "Make what you will".
For people with old fuzzy fond memories of Shadowbane, it is a nostalgia trip I am still enjoying. For 9 dollars, it honestly is a joyous return to youthful times.
Hailing from the time when MMO's were the brave new frontier of gaming, Shadowbane brings intriguing mechanics to the genre, like
Character Customization: One of the two unique pillars of Shadowbane, this is the one that gripped me when the game came out. Unlike launch WoW, or SWTOR, or other MMO's, your character was more than your class, your race went far beyond your appearance, and your prestige class meant more than a talent tree. Character building in Shadowbane begins with a simple choice, your race. Beyond choosing your looks though, this determined your starting stats, your stat caps, and your available basic class. Each race also came with certain racial traits, both positive and negative. Each character gets 30 freebie points at creation, to spend on stat increases, or runestones that could give you stat bonuses, or even entire skills you wouldn't have access to, like the ability to dual wield (RIP Rekthar, the dual-wielding axe throwing Half-Giant Barbarian). However, every race cost a number of your freebie points (A Centaur, for example, takes 10 of your 30 points), except for humans, who not only did not cost points but also gave you 1 extra point per level up.
So your race is chosen, which then determines what basic class you can select: Fighter, Healer, Rogue, Mage. Your starting class will determine your beginning skills. These skills range from armor types and weapon types to schools of magic, like Liturgy or Benediction. You even have skills like Dodge, Parry, Bargaining, Running, Athletics, and Toughness. In total, there are 57 Skills in the game. But there's more! At level 10, you then choose your prestige class. This is where your choice of race and base class combine to determine what you can promote to. But guess what? Many classes can be chosen from multiple base classes. You could be a Mage Bard, or a Rogue Bard. You could be a Mage Warlock or a Fighter Warlock (Yeah you heard that, a melee base class with a caster promotion). There are 22 prestige classes.
Beyond that, you have three discipline slots that you can fill as you play the game. What you can equip is determined by your race and class. The disciplines are another layer of specialization (or hybridization, depending on your goals). These are akin to WoW professions or SWTOR crew skills, except they are not crafting skills, but could be more aptly described as mini-classes. Taking the Saboteur disc, for example, gives you abilities like stealth (Which is helpful if you aren't a rogue) and untrackability, a personal teleport, and the ability to shut down siege equipment during a bane. Or, you could take the Wererat disc, which, well, you can guess. These disc can also grant skills you may not be able to access otherwise. There are 48 of these disciplines.
So, you have 12 races, with 22 classes, 55 skills, combining to create your character. As you can see from these numbers alone, this is a staggering amount of choice in how you want to craft your character. Indeed, you can roll two characters, with the same race, base class, prestige class, and disciplines. But if you choose to train different skills on those characters, they can play entirely differently from one another. This was one of the biggest things that drew me to the game back in the day. When it comes to conflict between players, the classes of Shadowbane are definitely built on the idea of rock paper scissors. A Thief can demolish Warriors that depend on their armor alone. Scouts are some of the fastest characters, have the best tracking, can beat out anybody's stealth (Indeed, the only way to get a drop on a good scout is to be a scout yourself). With 22 classes, no matter what someone chooses, there are people they can take on, and others they should avoid.
The other pillar was the focus of the game: PvP. Or more specifically: PvP beyond random free for alls and ganking. Before warzones, Shadowbane said "What if we let players build entire cities for their guilds? And then let them wage war with each other?" Shadowbane was a game of politics, overshadowed only by EVE in scope. Your guild could claim rule over an entire zone, collecting taxes from other cities in the zone, wage wars against bitter rivals, or simply open your gates to everyone and rake in gold as players come and go, buying what they need from your crafters.
The political aspect of Shadowbane is beyond intriguing. Guilds could be attack on sight, simply because one person had killed another during leveling, and the victim held a grudge. Wealer guilds could pay tribute, hoping to convince larger guilds to ignore them and throw a bane on someone else (Banes were Shadowbane's method of setting the terms for large scale conflict. An attacker would put a bane on a defender's city, meaning it could be attacked and destroyed, but the defending city go to choose the time when the bane would be active, ensuring they couldn't be targetted at a time that they were mostly offline).
Shadowbane's main focus, from day one, was player conflict. The game tracks who you kill, who killed you, has a pvp channel that announces deaths as they happen. Hell, there's an entire class whose big hook is stealing from other people's inventories. Your inventory can be looted from your body (Thankfully, you don't need to actually carry anything on you, so it would be anything you have looted, and if you loot something you really want to keep, you can use a recall scroll to immediately get back to town and throw your treasure in your bank).
Now, having heaped praise on the game, Shadowbane has some actual, real issues that are totally justifiable in not bothering with the game, such as
Click to move
Edge-scrolling camera control only, by default (I've rebound this to WASD)
Just, the worst graphics. Seriously, it looked bad on release and it hasn't gotten better
An arcane engine built specifically for this game. It has atrocious draw distance, everything is covered in a fog to cover that, and hills and mountains are sudden 90 degree terrain changes that your character just glides across no problem
Inventory loot on death. Yeah, this goes on the negative too, cause a lot of people just don't like that. Though there's a good chance if looting on death is a dealbreaker for you, most of this game will be
The UI. My god, the UI. It looks bad, the default layout is pants-on-head, and you need to alter it to get the information you actually want on the screen. Worse, it doesn't scale to modern resolutions. So it can be difficult to read your status bar numbers because the text is tiny, thanks to it remaining the same size at 2880X1620 that is was at 800X600
Obfuscation of information. What does STR do? Well, if you check your character sheet in game, you aren't going to be told. Luckily, the stats are basic and easy to figure out (STR, DEX, CON, INT, SPR). The bigger issue with lack of information is that you won't know what race or classes give access to what skills. Luckily, as the game is 20 years old, and has had emulators running for years, there's a wiki for that. A wiki that just so happens to be using the same map and build as the Steam version.
Shadowbane is an almost 20 year old game filled with arcane game design choices, dated graphics and gameplay, and a core of "Make what you will".
For people with old fuzzy fond memories of Shadowbane, it is a nostalgia trip I am still enjoying. For 9 dollars, it honestly is a joyous return to youthful times.