Shadowbane: An MMORPG with zero safe zones

I played MMO's as soon as the internet was a really stable enough to support them. Ok, I played them well before that. The main ones that I got involved in and would even say I got addicted to them to the point of actually negatively affecting my social and educational life were Anarchy Online and especially Dark Age of Camelot.

I loved both of these games and spent way more time on them than a person probably should. The silliest thing that we would do in these games is sit in a single location for hours on end killing the same foes over and over again in order to gain levels and this was actually a rather major part of everyone's experience. Looking back I don't even understand what we were thinking because other than the excitement of actually gaining a level, there was nothing fun about what we were doing. Yet we did it, sometimes all damn night long.

While Anarchy Online and DAOC had similar game mechanics, one was sci-fi and the other was fantasy. They also had very little in the way of PvP and even then it was in very controlled areas.

Then there was Shadowbane

Shadowbane was basically all PvP, all the time

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In a way this was a lot more realistic because it was a bit silly that you couldn't ever attack anyone in the wild, you couldn't even target them in other MMO's. Shadownbane had only 1 safe area and that was the city you start out in and learn the basics. It wasn't possible to level up in this city though, at some point you had to leave the gates and there was nothing stopping players at much higher levels from one-hit killing you as you take your first steps into the outside world.

The other part of this was that while you would respawn, the contents of your pack (not your equipped gear) could also be taken from you and if you had spent any amount of time out in the wild collecting loot, this could be a very frustrating situation.

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Graphically speaking Shadowbane was nothing particularly special and looked like basically every other MMO at the time perhaps even a little bit worse. To be fair, it was 2003 and things have changed a lot since then.

The fact that basically everywhere was a potential PvP area, made venturing out on your own a pretty dangerous situation and it became somewhat necessary to join a guild and travel in numbers. Depending on the name of the guild that the people saw below your name could have a major impact on whether or not they decided to kill you because most guilds would invoke a "kill on site" towards anyone that killed one of their players without a good reason. It was also possible the approximate location of any player in the game at any time so getting a bounty on your head was a bad idea.

This limited the amount of people that would camp the starter town and one-hit killing new players just for the hell of it. I found this out the hard was because even though I did NOT participate in it, a few of the people in my guild were regulars at doing this and it was determined by other other larger guilds that not just the people who were involved, by my entire guild was now "kill on sight."

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One of the best aspects of this game was the fact that your guild could make their own city basically wherever they wanted to do so. You would outfit this with castle walls, hire guards that were normally much more powerful than the average player and would take many hits to take down, and also shops inside the walls that you could sell actual merchandise at and make a profit. I owned an apothecary shop of sorts and it would make me money even when I wasn't logged in.

Visitors from outside your guild could visit to go shopping, but if they attacked anyone the guards would immediately descend upon them and overwhelm them - in this part of it the guards just appeared out of nowhere and didn't even need to be financed by your city, it was just part of the game mechanics that I thought was a good idea so that some super powerful group can't just come in and loot the entire city while no one is even there to do anything about it.

Your guild could also declare war on another guild and this would make it a full out free-for all including the use of siege equipment.

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One day I logged in to find my city including my show in ruins. Turns out that the couple of jerks in our guild that had been camping the starter city and sniping new players for fun invoked the ire of many other large guilds that worked together to completely annihilate our keep. It was shortly thereafter that a lot of the people in our group simply stopped playing the game. So in this regard Shadownbane was quite flawed as far as player retention was concerned.

Although I can't say for certain it seems to me that each of the servers would eventually have one specific guild that would become a dominant force and end up being the rulers of the land and if there was ever going to be any plan to overthrow them, it would take a massive force of other guilds working together in secrecy in order to overthrow them.

In that regard this MMO was a lot more "true to life" than others because the actions that you took in the game had consequences that would be determined by other players and depending on how extreme your actions were (such as the few jerks in my group who repeatedly killed newbies just for the sake of killing them) it could mean the end of your gameplay altogether.

Personally, I found the fact that basically anywhere could be considered a dangerous place to be to give the game a sense of fear that I would imagine living real life would be like hundreds of years ago. You are immediately fearful of anyone you see in the distance and ask them to "state their business" before deciding to run or prepare to defend yourselves. Also, the fact that diplomatic relationships were so important was a nice touch that instead of it being part of some story developed by the makers of the game, was determined by the players themselves.

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_{Group vs Group encounters could end up being a little hectic}

I thought it was very innovative and even though the gameplay itself was less-than-awesome, the innovative idea worked for a time.

The game apparently was re-released recently and you can get it for damn near free now on Steam, but honestly, there probably isn't much reason to do so since they didn't update the graphics at all, or so it appears.

It was an amazing thing at the time though and it would be interesting to see other games do something similar. It is kind of fun to see how a political system ends up being built and order to some degree ends up getting enforced even though the people driving said governance are under no restrictions at all from the game itself.

Did you play Shadowbane? If so I'd love to hear about it in the comments!