It’s Throwback Thursday, so I figured this is as good a time as any to talk about some Shadowbane lore.
A few weeks ago, one of the Shadowbane Reforged Discord community members was asking about some Shadowbane lore. I had some of the basic stuff on my website already. But, I am one of those crazy people who keep a lot of the things they work on and have some of the old websites on a hard drive, including an “SBEvents” site that we never actually released. So I updated the Shadowbane Lore section with a lot more information that we never actually published on the official website (or on my incognito The Great Library of Aerynth website).
If you’re interested in learning more about the lore and backstory of Shadowbane, check it out (sorry, I’m still getting all the issues of the webcomic up there… no excuse for why it is not done yet, except I am lazy):
If you read the above and asked yourself, “What’s Shadowbane Reforged?” I do have an answer for you. I got this snippet about it:
Shadowbane Reforged is a community-led emulator project based on the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game Shadowbane. To bring the game back to life, the team focuses on an improved game client and adding new content, including Races and Classes, that previously could not be played.
The team has been busy reverse-engineering the original Arcane Engine and client. As part of this project, Shadowbane Reforged is taking advantage of some of the features and functionality in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) to import improved graphical assets into the Arcane Engine. Using UE5 will benefit players with higher fidelity graphics as well as the development team with tools and features to craft a better world environment and experience.
The team is excited to bring a Shadowbane-inspired MMO not just to existing fans but to help create new ones in a game where players genuinely help shape the face of the game world.
It looks like a pretty interesting project with some real fans behind it. And talking to some of them brings back so many memories! It is crazy that a game we launched almost 20 years ago and shut down nearly 13 years ago could still have a dedicated following and community. Things like this help remind me that we did have something special and make me entertain real thoughts on trying to make my Labyrinth Online: War of the Gods concept a reality. But that is crazy talk for another day.
For those of you who played Shadowbane back in the day, you may hate me (even more) for this next part. What they are doing with UE5 reminds me of what I pitched when we contemplated what the Throne of Oblivion expansion would be. I wasn’t pitching the new areas with the new races and classes but instead porting over the client to something like Unreal Engine. And by like UE, I meant actually porting it over to UE (specifically) and using that time to optimize and rewrite our backend and server infrastructure. It is no secret that we had a lot of performance and technical challenges, so I wanted to use that as an opportunity to give the game a better foundation to run on instead of new races and classes. But, as you might imagine, that doesn’t make for a pretty-looking box to put on the shelves (remember, boxes on shelves was a big thing back then!), so we went with the Vampires, Necromancer, Nightstalker, and a few of the new Disciplines instead. To this day, though, I still believe having a better client and server architecture may have opened up some great opportunities back then. Ah, well, hindsight is 20/20!
Anyways, if Shadowbane Reforged sounds like something you might be interested in, you can check them out at (and, as I said, they do have a Discord as well): https://shadowbanereforged.com/
Random Update [Jun 8th]: I noticed I started getting traffic to this from GameBanshee but couldn’t figure out why until I found this article, so I figured I’d give them a backlink. FYI, GameBanshee, Internet Relations Manager was my original title back at Wolfpack. At the end, I was a Game Systems Designer and Lead for Shadowbane… which really just means I’m the one to blame for all the changes those last few years (whoops!). Backlink: https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/126447-shadowbane-lore-and-reforged-project.html