Shadowbane: State of the Game

The official Shadowbane website has been updated with a new "State of the Game" journal from producer Kellion. In it, Kellion talks about the last few months of patches, recent special events in the game, and upcoming features. An excerpt to follow:
The Rise of the Upstart Gods patches have been well received, especially with the inclusion of the Siege Spire and Divine Favor systems. We are extremely pleased that our siege changes have met a large degree of success with the community. And Spires have finally shifted the siege battle dynamic outside of a city's walls, instead of battles being fought from the inside out. This is more in tune with our vision for how sieges should work. In addition, we have added a new high-level adventuring area called "Aeran Belendor" and new Disciplines in the form of the Archmage and Bloodhorn.

In April, we successfully launched the Shadowbane 2.5 maintenance patch. While this patch contained some new content, our efforts were mostly directed at improving stability and performance. In this patch the programming team made several changes to our server architecture that will directly improve memory usage and performance. We also implemented several client-side changes, which should also improve performance. These efforts, combined with the barracks reductions, helped to eliminate many of the lag spikes that were affecting users. Our metrics have shown a large improvement in this area, although we realize that much more work still needs to be done. You can also check out our Q&A with Lead Programmer Ala Diaz for more details about our ongoing efforts to improve Shadowbane's performance.