Shadowbane: Play 2 Crush. Again?

If you’re simply here for the Meekskin download or how to “fix” the profanity filter, just click those anchors or scroll down to see the header names. You can grab my updated Minimal Skin, as well.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have even imagined myself writing an update like this. But, as we all know all too well, it’s been an interesting 12 months or so in the world. To add a little more “WTF” to the world, Shadowbane has relaunched. No, not an emulator version, an approved version. And it’s on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1475570/Shadowbane/

The rights for Shadowbane were sold back in (or around) 2015 by Ubisoft to Changyou, a company that operates online games, primarily MMOs, in China. And, according to SteamCharts, there are at least 600 or so concurrent players (via Steam). I say “at least” because I do not believe that counts people who are connecting to the game via other methods. Not that I believe anyone is expecting massive numbers. I mean, we launched Shadowbane back in 2003 and it was shut down in July 2009.

Speaking of which, this is, for the most part, that version of Shadowbane. I stopped being the Lead Designer on Shadowbane when I went to BioWare in 2008 and I know the team made a few more adjustments after I left. But what I’ve seen so far looks to be a modified version of that codebase. You wouldn’t have to make too many heavy modifications since both personal computers and servers have progressed in the last, what, almost 12 years since the game shut down.  I believe that is when the first Intel Core i5 and i7 processors were launched and we’re now on the 9th Generation of those. I’m assuming they have done some clean-up and I’m hoping they changed the original flat-file index to a relational database. But you probably don’t have to do too much to see a drastic improvement in performance just by running it on systems built in the last few years.

In one of the Facebook groups I follow, someone pointed out Shadowbane launched on Steam so I figured, what the hell, I’ll drop in for about 30 minutes and relive a little nostalgia and then jump back to Dungeons 3 (my current guilty pleasure). I mean, with how old the game is and how many modern MMOs there are today, I didn’t really expect myself or anyone really playing Shadowbane long, even at the one-time $11 price tag. But the next thing I know, I’m leveling my Irekei Huntress and joined a power-leveling group out at the Orc camp on newbie island and listening to a few groupmates talk about how their city just got baned and they need to ramp up a few characters quickly to get ready for the fight… And now I have almost 30 hours on my Steam record for the game.

Meekskin

Not only that, I found myself getting a copy of Meekskin (a player-created interface skin that, ironically, was built off of my Minimal Skin (or as I originally called it, PKChu Skin)) and making a few more modifications to that. I then make a few adjustments to that (you can download the version of Meekskin I’m currently using) but, in writing this and looking for hyperlinks, it looks like there is actually now a Meekskin 4K version out that has some more changes that I might check out.

Profanity Filter “Fix”

Speaking of adjustments, one of the challenging aspects is that Changyou has a profanity filter system but it looks to be, ahem, overly aggressive. For example, it asterisks out things like SB (for Shadowbane), Confessor looks more like ***fessor, etc. It’s rather annoying because it’s hard to follow some conversations when a quarter of the words have asterisks in them. But, I did find a “fix” via a discussion on Steam. The short version is I put up a download, config_wpak.zip file, and it has a readme with more details. Basically, there are two things you have to do (1) update your ArcanePref.cfg then make it read-only then (2) install a new config.wpak and also make it read-only. The download has a bit more details in the readme file, though.

Insert your favorite Stay on Topic meme here

Anyways, back to the point of my rambling (if there is actually one, that is). How long will this version of Shadowbane run? Who knows. How long will I play it? Who knows. Back when Shadowbane originally launched, there were a handful of MMOs on the market. Today there are, well, a LOT! So why play something that was sitting on the shelf for over a decade (and you can tell that just by looking at it) when you have these other games that have been either recently released or constantly updated? And yet, as I say that, I took what I planned to be a 30-minute session into playing for about 30 hours (not in one session, though — my days of playing a game till 4 AM or a day straight are way behind me, heh). And while I don’t agree with everything that Josh Strife Hays says about our nostalgia glasses in old MMOs, I do agree with a lot of it. Had I picked up Shadowbane for the very first time today, I don’t think I personally would have made it off newbie island.

But that isn’t the case. I put a lot of my blood, sweat, and tears into Shadowbane, as a community manager, as a designer, and as a player over the course of those nine years. But, it wasn’t always the game that kept me around. It was those playing the game. The community that formed around it. And all the (untapped) potential both the game and community had. Some day I may actually jump back into the game industry and, who knows, dust off my old concepts on what I feel a spiritual successor of Shadowbane would be.

So how long will the game be around? I imagine how Changyou will measure success will be a large part of that. I highly doubt they are expecting WoW numbers or even Albion Online numbers. But there is probably a monetary metric they are tracking on how profitable the game is (not just to break even on costs but how much money at a minimum they feel should be put back into the company’s revenue stream).

As for me? Shrug. Until I stop having fun. I don’t plan on being a hardcore player but I will probably drop in from time to time on a character from time to time. Whether that is to cleanse the world as my Confessor, keep the desert clean as my Irekei Huntress, or another character, we’ll see.

If you do pop in and see me online, say hi! I’m Ashen Temnper (due to Temper being disallowed as a last name). Funny enough, I was getting heckeld (in a fun way, not being rude) as faking being Ashen Temper by a variety of players so I had to tweet the below screenshot to prove I am me. Which I found overly amusing… why would someone want to fake being me?! 😀