User Reviews (21 - 31 of 90)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Shadowbane: Great idea, poor start

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: May 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First the positive aspects:

1. Great multi-classing.
2. Political impact of guilds is seriously great
3 Economy and higher level training must be done in player cities - great for p ushing ppl into guilds.

The negatives:

1. Client: It crash's on both mac and windows often, it has had severe memory leakage problems, and continues to have small memory leakage problems. Put simply, the client does not perform up to par with other MMORPG's on the market5

2. LAG: Quite frankly on both platforms, the lag caused by more than 15 people in an area is horrid. Worst on the mac as it drops you to unplayable, 0fps.

3. Sieges are very badly laggy and cause crashes. Again the people problem - 100 ppl on screen? The lag makes it unplayable for most. we're talking 20 sec lag.

4. GVG is too laggy to be highly feasible. For instance, your in a grp of 10, exp'n, and another group comes to attack you. You end up with lag of 10 seconds, so you can respond/cast spells, etc with a 10 sec lag...

5. Log in servers: tons of issues here, so when you want to play, especially on weekends, you'll find the login servers giving you problems. So if it's raelly busy on a saturday night, and you're in but go LD - it may take 20 minutes to log back in!

I'm on the mac - and it is slightly better on PC but not much.

Overview: The game is based on War, gvg battle. The game is rather moot if its so laggy that this can't be done too often.

NOT FOR THOSE NEW TO MMORPGs!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: April 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If this is your first MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) I would strongly advise you consider trying another game first for 1 reason: PvP (Player vs Player). I have the game, I have never cared for PvP, and the only reason I am playing it because it is new. I have beta tested, and played Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheronýs Call, and Dark Age of Camelot, so I have a lot of experience in this genre. The majority of the people who are playing this game are HARD CORE! They are seasoned veterans who give little quarter. What does this mean to you, the new gamer? Well, it means getting killed after spending 2 hours fighting monsters, and losing all your gold. It means opening up your bank, only to find the item you where going to put into it has been stolen from your inventory. It means sitting down to rest somewhere and getting killed instantly from an assassin who killed you for no other reason than it was ýfuný. If I dislike the PvP environment so much, why am I playing the game and why didnýt I give it 1 star instead of 3? Well, I am playing it because I am a veteran player, and I am bored with all the other games out there. I basically try all the new games. I gave it 3 stars because the problems I have with the game are based on my personal preference. If you like PvP, this is a good game for you. Personally, if I want to fight against other players as opposed to with them, I play a first person shooter, like Battlefield 1942. I will stop playing this game the moment something better (Star Wars Galaxies or EQ2) comes out.

Waste of money and time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: May 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

You can get around the lag issue by simply playing when the sever population is low (you will still need a high end computer and graphics card).

Yes, a new release will have bugs but the interface is terrible (the worst ever) and no patch is going fix this game. The graphics are a joke.

Any company that would release such a shabby product as Shadowbane has no pride and is only concerned about profits.

A lot of $$$ and time for a game that will never be able to live up to these 5 star compliments (ROFL).

Starts off fun, ends up dull

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 27, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I played this until 50th level. I was fortunate in that my server had not yet reached stagnancy. This is one of the big probs in the game. There are supposed be massive guild wars for control. There are, but eventually they end when a guild wins. And then everything gets very booooring. With only one guild in control, theres no interguild fighting. No PvP. Or if it is, it's very lopsided. The classes are well designed. I think making the disciplines a droppable, stealable item, instead of a questable item was a big mistake. It creates another chokepoint for powerful guilds to maintain control.
What ends up happening is the PvP is so uncommon, that most players end up sitting around farming xp, just to have something to do. Or starting up alts. Just to have something to do. Because they can't PvP.

Shadowbane - big hype, nothing delivered

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: September 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I followed the development of Shadowbane for years. I loved the concept and waitedr an eternity it seemed for the game to come out. Unfortunately, to my dismay, the game fell very short from the hype and is on its way down the drain.

Constant lag issues, unbalanced characters classes, dated graphics, no lore and no depth make this game a deffinate "do not buy". The only thing this game had going for it, PvP, was designed terribly and the Guild vs Guild warfare is a joke with the constant crashing and lag.

Save yourself the money and misery that thousands of people went through giving this game a chance. Buy something else.

Worst Of The Gendre

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

For the type of hype this game has received while still in development over 3-4 years ... this is a piece of dung.

The unbelievably unstable login and character select screens and the constant "sb.exe errors" during sieges make your entire gameplay a waste of time.

This game should never have been released in the condition it's currently in ... and this is 3 months after its release.

By the way, if you had the idea of saving some cash by subscribing for a year (and also unlocking the 3 locked races) and figure you can always cancel and get a refund for the unused months .... forget about it. They will not ... NOT ... give you a refund no matter how much they acknowledge the fault and blame is entirely theirs.

what a con...

Delays everywhere you go

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: March 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I beta tested this game, and up to the last week before they shut down for the public release, there would be delays when moving even short distances in game. This all had to do with graphics loading and positioning other players. I am an avid player of EverQuest and EQ has "zones" where there are 30 second delays when moving between territories. Shadowbane eliminates zones at the cost of adding smaller delays nearly everywhere you move. These delays get worse as the number of people on your server or your immediate vicinity grow.

I had a cable modem and very fast graphics card, as well as a 1.5 Ghz CPU with 512MB of memory. All these things couldn't make ShadowBane run any faster, its graphics delays tolerable... if you can handle waiting for them to better streamline its performance, go ahead and try it. If you'd rather not be one of the "paying beta testers" after its initial release, wait and check the boards to see how the loading delays and lag issues are coming along.

Not ready for Beta

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: April 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When I first read the hype on this game I became excited. With so much to offer Shadowbane sounded like the next generation MMORPG. It's not. Shadowbane does not need to be released to beta to find problems. Lag, poor graphics and the horrid interface makes me wonder how it got to beta let alone a retail self. You will need a lot more then the recommended system for this game. Even with cable, 8x APG/128DDR and 2gig of ram, good luck. I get no lag playing DAOC even in RvR with Zerg's galore. Shadowbane is a step backward from current available games. If you can't take the game back like I did, don't buy it.

Not ready for primetime

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: March 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Been playing the beta for a couple months and the game isn't ready to launch. It has some nice features that are marred by serious technical issues. The servers and client crash regularly, the servers lag badly when more than 1000 people log on at the same time, and core gameplay elements are terribly boring. I could understand some of the lag is the graphics were top notch, but they aren't and I could understand some of the crashing problems if the game was cutting edge, but it's not. You can level quickly, in fact I generally reach the soft cap level in less than a week, but then you spend the vast majority of your time trying to get enough gold to support your town. The PvP/GvG in the game is slanted decidely toward casting classes. In fact melee classes cannot engage other players who run away at all, even when right on top of them. I really liked some features of this game, but there's no way I'd ever recommend it like it is now, less than a week before launch. Maybe in a few months it'll be worth checking out, but not now.

What to say.. what to say..

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: May 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Pointless. Clunky. Ugly. Boring.

That pretty much sums up Shadowbane.

The default settings of this game renders the text in an almost unreadable way. Only after minutes of fiddling did I figure out how to make character selection good enough to READ. After that, I had to wade through dozens of pointless, archaic options which weren't explained nearly well enough, then I was plopped down in the middle of a giant world with no real sense of purpose. There were no cities with handy NPC's explaining what you ought to be doing. Oh no, none of that foolishness! You are dropped, and sent on your way, with only the leanest explanations as to what the world is all about.

However, that isn't the biggest downside of this game. The biggest, by far, is the interface. I can't describe how ugly, counter-intuitive, and non-functional this thing is. You basically get two modes, ugly pictures on the side, or ugly square in the middle. You are allowed to "customize" it by pulling the shapes of the windows, but they scale in 40 pixel segments, and often won't line up with the edges of the screen, instead stopping short.

After getting passed that, you are faced with a huge world.. with a few distinct places. Well, distinct in that you have 4 or 5 different textures, and that's IT. The world is huge, and it all looks the same. After a few weeks (and a few boring levels) I was fighting the same mindless UI creatures in the same exact ways.

Boring, even as far as MMORPGs go.

Avoid it.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next 

Actions