Aliens in the Desert

I firmly believe that Shadowbane was created by a group of people who spent much of the 80’s (or earlier) playing hour upon hour of PVP MUDs. In fact, reading the web-site before the game went into beta, it seemed the designers were a disparate group of PVPers with a couple folks thrown in who wanted to inject cool story elements.

I was skeptical about this game at first, but I read some very exciting sounding things on Ubi-Soft’s web-site. Secret guilds you had to find in the world in order to join? Being able to work with other players to make your own towns and control them? A team of story writers who would continue to work on an evolving storyline and let the players interact with it? I could potentially become a wererat? Sign me up!

I was accepted into the beta and logged right in. They had some neat character races that had not appeared in other fantasy games. I was annoyed I could not be a female Minotaur but I settled instead on a centaur. Character creation was fun, as I got to assign neat powers to my centaur based on her background.

Afer I had spent awhile watching the impressively smooth animation of my centaur girl running around and playing a bit with her magic powers, I started exploring the game. I did, in fact, find many neat hidden areas: mystical looking clearings, temples, and the like. But they were all empty. No hidden quests or guilds so far. I killed a lot of snakes (at least it wasn’t bunnies anymore) and kept wandering around. I found a whole centaur city and was very excited, but I couldn’t seem to do anything meaningful there, so I wandered off. I found some nice fellow who helped me slay a group of goblinoids. And camp. And slay them. And camp. And slay them. My, this is sounding familiar. I asked him all about the cool guilds and player-owned towns. He told me this wasn’t really accessible until my character was much higher level. As he guided me back towards town, something nasty started chasing me and I ran…..but my character kept getting stuck on grass (yeah, grass), and so the mighty centaur was slain.

The next evening I logged in again only to discover that the area where I was logging in was being plagued by some terribly vicious killer monster. I had just enough time to survey the pile of corpses before it killed me. I re-spawned (in the same spot of course) and it killed me again. And again. Finally I stopped the game, waited a bit, and logged in again. There were all the corpses, including about five of mine. And there was the murderous critter, still lying in wait for unsuspecting centaurs to log into the game. Oh well.

I never returned to Aerynth. I was willing to overlook many things that simply seemed like bugs in a beta. However, while all the interesting content sounded like fun, it seemed like a drag that it was only available at higher levels. In the meantime it seemed the only course for the young adventurer was the ye olde camp and slay routine. I doubted my patience would last long enough to get a character past the neophyte stage.