Shadowbane Official Strategy Guide

List Price: $9.99 Discount Price: $1.23

Customer Reviews:

Less than useless [Posted on 2003-07-29]
It's been said that the worst kind of ignorance isn't not knowing things, it's knowing things that aren't so. In that context, the Shadowbane strat guide spreads ignorance. It is riddled with errors. Some are cut-and-paste errors, like spells with the wrong description or the trainers' spell lists that duplicate the Bard spells for the Channeler trainer. Others are factual errors, like the discipline runes, levels for spells, etc. While the numerous typos and editing errors (didn't these people have a proofreader?) are fairly obvious, the factual errors are stealthy but dangerous. You think you know something, but what you "know", what the official strategy guide told you, turns out to be dead wrong. Most of the useful material should have been in the manual. Nearly all of it is available on the Web. I bought it for the maps, but they turned out to be nearly worthless; there are player-made maps online that are enormously better.

The strategy guide is a case of the publisher trying to sell you the manual that should have come with the game for an additional twenty bucks. If it was accurate that might even be worth it, but as the mess it is, you'll find one of its flaws when you least expect it and the resulting "gotcha" can put a major damper on any fun you manage to wrest out of Shadowbane. Don't waste your money on this book.

Helpful for beginners, much less so beyond. [Posted on 2003-10-01]
Shadowbane has a rather steep learning curve, and pitifully few in game guides to push you in the right direction. I gave the game a shot at first for a week or so without the book and had rather a rough time of it.

Once I picked up the book though, it became kind of a guide to learning Shadowbane. Despite the heavy amount of typo's and out and out mistakes, it does make a good teaching tool if you're considering dumping your time and cash into the game. I found myself referencing it continually, even after I'd been playing 5 months for certain statistics. Once you learn how to spot the mistakes, it's not really bad.

I think some one else's review said it best in that this book should have been included with the game as the manual because life without it would have been very difficult.

I don't reccomend buying Shadowbane at all, but if you're going to, I reccomend picking this book up. As a little bonus, beyond listing the statistics, they continue the short story of Gareth for several more chapters, which actually made a good read. Not worth the 20 by itself, but still a nice bonus.

I gave this book 2 stars because the game itself isn't that good, the book has a way-beyond-acceptable amount of problems with it, and the writer/editor should have been fired. But having seen how the actual game is run, the book stands at about par with it for errors and problems.

Nope, no comment [Posted on 2004-01-13]
Went to Best Buy, decided to look around, saw shadowbane strategy guide, thought it might be nicely done, flipped to a random page, shut it, walked away. End of story

Value sink. [Posted on 2004-03-03]
When I first got ahold of this book it was an incredible resource for the Shadowbane game. The more I played, the more began to notice small errors in the book. These happen, and I was still satisfied.

As time went on, the errors were getting numerous and confusing - I began to highlight each error so I would remember what info is wrong.

It's been almost a year since I've had the book now, and every single page has at least one highlighter mark. A few pages are completely highlighted out as they are completely erroneous. The errors include:

-Blatant typos
-Copy/Paste errors (The book has a section that discribes spell attributes. You can tell that the writer used one spell as a template, as it appears almost six times in the list with different names.
-Statistical errors
-Credit errors (A portion of the book is a part where people submitted their character's template. One of them was wrongly credited [wrong name given] even though the accompanying picture has his name right on it!)

The worst part about the book is that in the past few months Shadowbane has gone through such a tremendous change that 90% of the book's correct information (Which applies to just over half of it's total information) is now unaplicable because it's been changed by the game developers.

The book was good, but the more I got used to the game the more I noticed the book was wrong. Now that the game has matured so much, the book is essentially useless.

Updated, but still so far out of date [Posted on 2004-10-03]
I bought the First Edition of this book not too long after I started playing Shadowbane, and back then it was a handy reference, even thought it had a lot of mistakes and omissions. I was pleased to see that they'd finally released an updated edition, but it is not even close to current. It doesn't have any mention of the Rise of Chaos expansion pack that has been out for quite some time, and is about to go even further out of date with the upcoming release of the "Throne of Oblivion" expansion pack.

To be honest, you'll find just as much information with at least the same level of timeliness and accuracy for free online. And if you are playing the game, and not sure how to develop a good character, don't be afraid to ask for advice from higher level players in your race/class/discipline.

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