Shadowbane Lore and Reforged Project

Sean Dahlberg, who you may know as Wolfpack Studios’ Internet Relations Manager, recently took to his personal blog to direct us to a collection of lore articles for Ubisoft’s PvP-focused MMORPG Shadowbane that went offline back in 2009.

And if checking those out got you itching to play some Shadowbane, the blog post linked above also tells us about Shadowbane Reforged, an unofficial project that aims to revive the game using UE5. Alternatively, you may want to check out the game’s free to play edition that launched last year on Steam.

Here are a few paragraphs about the Reforged project:

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/