A good topic making the rounds in our blog community asks the question ‘what MMO would you unmake?’ The point being what game do you feel the MMO space would be better off without? Too many blogs to link here have already commented on the subject, yet I don’t believe anyone has mentioned the following game: (comment and correct me if I missed something)
Shadowbane.
Why would I unmake Shadowbane? Because at its core, Shadowbane is everything I dream about in an MMO, and in my opinion has the base structure to be an amazing game. It’s a PvP focused, dark fantasy, player controlled game that revolves around guilds laying siege to towns built by other guilds. Many other games have incorporated some aspects of those ideas, like DAoC with player controlled keeps and some siege weapon use, EVE Online with player built Outposts and Corp vs Corp focused PvP, the upcoming Warhammer Online and Age of Conan games featuring PvP, etc; yet no game before or since has focused on the guild vs guild, player build and controlled city vs city gameplay of Shadowbane.
So again, why would I unmake it? At launch, Shadowbane was a technical mess, released long before it was ready. It also never had the commercial backing of a major release. As a result, it was a commercial failure, and now resides in ‘free to play’ land with all the other failed MMOs. Developers looked at that failure and assumed a PvP-focused MMO was not commercially viable, and along with the success of the PvE friendly WoW, MMOs went away from PvP and into pure PvE (WoW, EQ2, DDO, AC2, LoTRO, the list goes on). Only recently are we seeing the return of PvP focused MMOs with WAR and AoC, along with the continued success of EVE Online.
In a world were Shadowbane never came out, perhaps it would not take as long for the PvP community to get some love. And perhaps we would actually see a quality PvP based fantasy game without the trappings of PvE elements like gear dependency, quest grinds, leveling treadmills, etc. It would also be tough to sell the idea of a dark fantasy, city vs city PvP game now to a major publisher, considering we supposedly already have that game and we see how that worked out.
Remove Shadowbane, use those core ideas, give a good studio enough money and time to actually finish the game, and I’ll be one happy MMO gamer.
Hardcore Casual 
Shadowbane is a good choice too. It had some good ideas, but implemented them very very poorly. I really liked the character building system. I really liked the player built cities and guild cohesion. I really hated the graphics, the bugs, the exploits, and the unbalanced repercussions of player behavior.
I was in a small guild that mostly minded it’s own business and was focusing on building up a city economy. An ally guild invited some of our members to participate in a raid on a hostile city and some of our people went. The city that was raided was either allied to the biggest, most powerful guilds on the server or convinced them that the attack was unprovoked and our alliance were a bunch of bastards (neither true). The uber alliance picked our guild as an easy target to make an ‘example’ of and razed our city to the ground while everyone was asleep. We were mostly mid level players and logged in the next day to find our home was gone and the guild bankrupt. The guild leaders quit in disgust and the guild fell apart. I logged out in a neutral town and never logged in again.
Somehow I think the game mechanics for that could have been set up better. PvP in a game like Shadowbane needs to be meaningful, but the potential for griefing needs to be limited by mechanics.
Thats a good, although sad, story Graktar. The fact that such a story is even possible is why SB had such huge potential.
Since we can’t take it back, I would love for someone to buy up the IP for Shadowbane and just release SB2, but do it right.
Or just copy all it’s good ideas, make up some other dark fantasy lore, and do it that way. While the SB lore was decent enough, it was nothing groundbreaking anyway.
I have a feeling that the WoD MMO (produced by CCP, no official word as yet) should bring some deep PvP to the dark fantsy genre.
What happened to Shadowbane was a real shame it sounded like such a good idea. I wonder how it should be done differently and on what terms do we allow player controlled cities to be raided? How to stop sleeper ganking? I guess these are common problems to persistent titles