Shadowbane Reboot?
I don’t know how I didn’t pick up on this sooner. Shadowbane’s Patch 22 will apparently reboot the entire game. No, not the servers. The game. Like a comic book reboot, only much deadlier to the franchise. They are planning on deleting everything–characters, cities, items… everything. Every single thing players have ever worked for will be deleted. Not just for inactive accounts, but for all of them. I don’t think it’s necessary to comment further.
I know they had a log of problems with exploitation and hacking early on, but they are WAY too far into that game to just call a mulligan. I can’t imagine what they saw as a reason to justify such a radical action. They must be thinking “OK the game is stable now, screw the players we have, let’s get a new batch” because that is what’s going to happen. Am I going to put effort into a game where they do a reset? Ask SOE about what happened to our SWG accounts after the NGE, which was essentially a reset.
That is about the dumbest idea I have ever heard.
If you want a fresh start, create a “Classic” server where people can enjoy the original game again (sort of like EQ did). I’d love WoW if Blizzard would do that.
I almost jumped in on the “this is dumb” bandwagon, but in a game built entirely on PvP… I’m actually not seeing a problem. Yeah, maybe outright wiping is a mistake, but I could agree with resetting all characters to zero, that way you keep the name but lose the advancement. The people still playing Shadowbane are likely to be the sort of folks who a) like PvP and therefore b) like competition. A wipe also allows for the opportunity to get new players in “on the ground floor” rather than trying to encourage them to be the lambs for the experienced players to slaughter. Who knows, maybe they’ll introduce rewards for “winning” and have annual game reboots…
I have no interest in Shadowbane myself, never did… for now I’m going to adopt a “wait and see” attitude toward this reboot until we see how it plays out.
It’s certainly interesting, and for some older players who were fans of certain MUDs it might not even be all that shocking of an idea… it’ll be very intriguing to see how the community responds.
ATITD does it of course but then in that game you know it’s coming, and you are in a way part of the process of taking it to the end.
Funnily enough the players themselves are overwhelmingly behind this move.
The discussion thread on the SB forums is almost unanimously positive.
Colour me as surprised as anyone on this. I’ve never played SB myself but I’ve had it explained to me and it is possible to ‘win’ so the players who have ‘won’ want the chance to have another go.
Leveling in Shadowbane is very very fast, certainly 4x faster than WoW. Gear degrades and you can lose gear in PvP. Any city you can build can be destroyed which is ultimatly the point of the PvP.
This all leads to a very transient game which I predict will do just fine with a wipe like this.
I’d have no issue with this if this had been an open possibility from day one, so people knew what to expect and invested their time and effort accordingly. The problem with persisitent worlds is that the design decisions that blew up in your face years ago can alter the landscape for years to come. You can work within those constraints as much as humanly possibly, but sooner or later you have to decide what damages the player base more: continuing with all the scars and baggage accumulated since launch or wiping away the investment they’ve already put into the game.
[...] seem to be a lot of people shocked at the news that Shadowbane has decided to press the reset button with their next patch, [...]
You know, this whole reboot has actually gotten me more interested in the game again. I actually downloaded it and have been wandering around with my 60 Crusader (which is, sadly, no longer at the cap) and Thief. The world is absolutely full of cities, with no room left to accomplish much of anything for people like me.
The reboot has me interested enough in Shadowbane that I’ll probably try to lock and load when they wipe things clean. It may be a good idea after all, especially since the game is free and I’m not paying a monthly fee (though I technically did pay a monthly fee when I earned all my stuff).
[...] seem to be a lot of people shocked at the news that Shadowbane has decided to press the reset button with their next patch, [...]
Why be shocked at a wipe? Bringing a caracter to lv 75 takes one week max and u can get to r5 in one day. I mean I am totally ok with the wipe. When the game started, there was many rival guilds in the world. Now only 3 guilds remain, and if u create a new guild, u basically need to go under one of those 3 nations or it’s useless. Wipe means change in nation/guild place on the map, new and just competition between guilds, new geopolitics, items that are good but not great will be useful again (and salable), nice items will need to be found again and will not be concentrated in couple of hands. Basically, I am totally for it, it will refresh and debug the game while permitting new players to progress at same time then older players, and have the same chances. Go wipe go!
This is BS i dont know about yall but this gets on my nerves.
you leave for 5 months and then everything goes straight to hell.