Record of Motion

It just hit me today. Shadowbane is gone. For good. I can’t go back and play it again. Ever. At least until the SBEmu project gets done. It feels strange, thinking that tomorrow morning, instead of getting up to pwn in PvP at a siege, I’ll be blasting experiments on Anarchy Online or role-playing on Morrowind (which, IMO, is far superior to Oblivion). Even the website for ShadowBane (chronicle.ubi.com) is gone now. It redirects to the Ubisoft home page.

I’ve also discovered what turned me off to AO in the first place. The combat is slow. Seriously, the only ones who deal any major damage until lvl 100 are the Enforcers. Everyone else is stuff with some pretty crappy dps. At about lvl 100, Agents can one-hit-kill most mobs, but only once every 2.5 minutes. In Shadowbane, combat was fast. And for me, the measuring rod for all MMORPGs is ShadowBane.

Today, in my boredom from AOs slow combat, I finished my Fallout 3 mod, Vault 113 (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4569), while waiting on the combat in AO. If the combat is that slow, you have a problem. Even WoWs combat speed in raids is about on par with the standard AO speed. And for those that dont know, raid mobs take between 1 minute and 5 minutes each. Alright, so not that slow, but it feals the same. Not a whole lot is going on to watch during combat.  Even though AO is now officially the most tweak-heavy MMORPG still running, without good combat, it’s doomed. It’s on the way there already

Not all is lost though, I still have Morrowind, and I’ve been having waaaaaaaaaaaaay to much fun on it.

Even though I had previously stated that I would be playing ShadowBane until it shuts down on July 1st, I have changed my mind. An MMORPG without the MMO is no fun at all. Especially one like ShadowBane, where the entire end-game revolves around PvP combat. There is almost no one on anymore. I am officially pronouncing ShadowBane dead to me.

The second MMO I played (with the first being that craptastic game Runescape) was Anarchy Online. It was fun, but getting stuck in the Temple of the Three Winds for 3 months unable to level because I kept dying just before I got enough XP is NOT fun. So I stopped playing, found ShadowBane, and never looked back. Until now. I’ve installed AO again, and relearned all my nanos and attacks. In the past couple of days I went from level 50 to level 65. No small feat (IMHO) after my previous inability to level. I also got involved in a bit of intrigue regarding a previously banned player. More on that once I find out whether I can blab about it without guild repercussions if anyone finds out.