Shadowbane Lives On 25
eToyChest is reporting that many of the developers are Wolfpack Studios, closed since May 15th, have banded together to keep Shadowbane running for the players. Now known as 'Stray Bullet Studios', they'll be running the game for Ubisoft while they work on a new MMO for the 'next generation'. Via his Zen of Design blog, it appears Damion Schubert will not be among the Shadowbane handlers.
Re:What is the situation? (Score:4, Interesting)
1)Game is written by independent studio Wolfpack
2)Ubi agrees to publish (2nd publisher)
3)Game doesn't do as well as hoped, due to really fucking buggy code (the game should have been delayed another 6 months)
4)Ubi buys out Wolfpack
5)Time passes
6)Ubi dumps the monthly fee making it a free game
7)Ubi fires all of Wolfpack
8)Wolfpack reforms as a 3rd party and now runs SB for Ubi, but still free.
I can only see 2 things going on here.
1)A tax ploy of some kind, that requires a 3rd party
2)They have a lot of faith in WP's new MMO. FOr this to be true, it has to be pretty much beta quality and near release. Otherwise, with WP's track record, this makes no sense.
Re:WoW (Score:4, Interesting)
Asheron's Call Darktide/Beta World Black was FFA PvP and players loved it. I should say players who were mages, melee characters hated it as there was a "lack of itemization" to use a WoW euphamism. They tried to balance the skills and did a somewhat fine job, but the macroing and duping drove away a lot of the 'honest' players. It was a combination of code and publisher policy issue that drove away the players.
Shadowbane also had a FFA PvP environment, and players loved the game; hated the login bugs, sb.exe errors, rampant duping, and tedium neccesary to recover from a ZERG destroyed city. Lots of people played the game on release, lots of people left the game in 6 months because of the flawed code and building ruleset. Code and ruleset drove the players away.
I hate to bring it up, as it is still looking 'far away', but Darkfall Online is the only real FFA PvP+ game that looks to be coming out. The original developers were supposedly Darktide players, played Shadowbane and other popular MMOG's, and thier rulebase (when I was following it 2 YEARS AGO) looked well thought out and fair a PvP environment. However, it has been in development for a long time. And people aren't really sure if and when it will ever *really* come out. Which is sad.
Ahh well, my point stands that games can be successful, filling the niche market of the PvP crowd. They won't neccesarily be 6 million+ subscribers successful, but they will make thier money.
Re:WoW (Score:1, Interesting)
1) to build a city, you had to farm monsters. endlessly
2) to rebuild a city, you had to farm monsters. Endlessly. without a base of operations.
3) because of this, guilds who were a part of a losing faction would quit that faction and join the winning faction, so they could play relatively safely
4) Because of this constant quit the loser, join the winner mentality, the world would end up with one superguild, and a few tiny guilds that would regularly get wiped out
5) This was boring