MMOries of a Gamer: Shadowbane

Hello everyone and welcome to the second chapter of MMOries of a Gamer. This time I’ll tell you a story of a funny thing that happened to me playing Shadowbane, a game that unfortunately passed away in July 1, 2009.

Read on after the jump and enjoy.

It was 2003. After some years playing Everquest where my MMO life was full of events, I decided to stop and give another game a try. By then, there were not as many MMOs as today in the market, but one of them caught my attention on a magazine: Shadowbane. I remember telling a friend about playing together a new MMO and  told he would try Shadowbane, so we both ordered the game to the US, as it was impossible to find the game in Spain. It took a week to receive our copies, but finally we put our hands in the second MMO of our lives.

Once into the game, we played daily and quite hardcore. I had a wizard and used to nuke everything on sight, being really powerful in PVP combat and providing a huge amount of DPS in groups. I think the maximum level was 100 by those days, I’m not sure, but we leveled quickly and learned how to play decently.  As in this game, everything was about war and PVP between enemy clans and guilds, these were always looking for new recruits. A guild wanted us in their ranks and we joined them.

Every guild in Shadowbane had their own fortress. With united efforts, all members could help building better defences and buildings, as well of hiring NPCs for different services. We always were coordinated defending our guild fortress in turns, while others were outside hunting, exploring, gathering or attacking rival guilds. Every time you headed out of the walls of your fortress you could become an easy target, so we usually were in groups, for safety.

One day, I was in a mountainous snowy area hunting with three guildies. We were in a spot in the middle of a snowed forest, surrounded by strong winds and full of lurking beasts. The place was a ruined house out of nowhere with nothing special but an insane spawn rate for monsters in it and a boss appearing from time to time. While we were farming the boss there, one of my guildies was making jokes to all of us, but I was the main target of his mocking arts.

For more than an hour we stood in the spot, hunting and watching our backs looking for attackers sneaking for prey. I remember using my fly spell to cover all the area, looking far for enemies and protecting the group while they kept bringing down every monster spawning. From time to time I mocked the funny guild-mate till we both ended laughing hard while /rude each other like crazy, after even making a shortcut for that emote.

All of a sudden, in the middle of our mocking fight, the boss spawned and started to hit our warrior madly. It took us by surprise and unprepared so I got nervous and started to cast my most powerful nuke immediately. Did I tell you Shadowbane was a full PVP game yet, yes? Yes, it was. As I was emoteing the other player making jokes, I had him on my target so the deadly nuke was casted directly on him. A huge thunderbolt explosion lighted the area as my poor guildie died by my own hands.

Was a chaos fight, but we finally took the boss down and revived the dead mocking guildie. Then, he said:

-“Mental note: never mess with wizards!”

I felt horrible and apologized heartily, but then all group started to ROFL. That was fun.

Shadowbane wasn’t a major MMO, but it had very cool features and those thrilling enormous PVP battles were glorious. Sometimes I miss it.

Have you ever played Shadowbane? Post your stories and remembrances of the game. Did you like the story or maybe you dislike it? Leave your commentaries to us, we would love to read them.

See you all next week with a new chapter in MMOries of a Gamer: Star Wars Galaxies.