f13.net forums - iOS: Shadow Cities

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July 20, 2025, 04:22:50 AM

we're back, baby

Location-based gaming was always a soft spot of mine; the thought of being able to virtually duke it out over real stuff with real other people around you is nifty. This game is still a little basic and unpolished, but I like its potential so far and it's free (as long as you don't fall for the very bad bargain of buying mana potions for real money when you can get plenty from playing for free). The premise is good enough, that the players are mages keeping spirits away from the unsuspecting humans and fighting over resources. You can teleport to friends in game, so you aren't always tethered to your physical location, which is smart. It's the details that are still stumbling blocks, like the fact that the gateway resources are of somewhat dubious value to be claiming, and the very limited nature of character development.

They're still updating the game regularly, though, so I think it has potential. It also works on ipods, though not as accurately without a GPS.

It's in the app store, you need to sign up here to get the account to sign in. They give 'a reward' to new players for signing up on an old player's link, though the feature is new so I'm unsure just what reward is involved. Send a friend request to Valatar in-game for help. And I'm obligated to tell you to sign up on the side of the Architects, because the other team is dumb.

Have you noticed any significant difference between being on 3G or wifi?

Good free apps are like Pokemon for me, I'll be checking this out for sure. Your description and the screenshot in the app store are intriguing me.

When you first teleport to an area it can be annoying if your connection is slow, as it takes longer to load the map from Google so you can see the 'landscape'. But once you're loaded, lag isn't much of an issue. So a lot like Eve in that regard; if you can load the grid at all you're probably fine.

I think it's a great idea with a pretty flawed implementation so far. First, they've got some of the standard mechanics problems that always crop up in MMOGs but as usual, rather than grasp any of those nettles, the devs are more interested in thinking about shiny new mechanics which will introduce serious balance issues. A few things they could fix promptly. It's a coop PvP game but they've got a fucking retarded system for awarding kill credit that guarantees tons of whining about kill steals and actually keeps people from being as open at encouraging coop as the game really requires for fun. It's also a system that strongly incentivizes people to just sit in their little suburban hideaway with a second account and farm the shit out of each other endlessly, but that kind of thing is probably going to happen no matter what they do. The placement of some of the assets can be fucking weird and lead to all sorts of exploits, some of them making use of known lag problems.

Anyway, that's the usual shit, I just get tired of every new dev making a mmog walking into some of these classic game design problems without a clue and then whistling past all sorts of graveyards while they promise new features which will exacerbate those problems.

Far more importantly, this is a game which has huge potential because it is geolocated, on devices that excel at making use of that. And it is so uninteresting in the way it deals with that so far that I wonder if the devs have even the faintest idea what they could do with it. Right now the game just slaps gateways down in a way that often makes little sense, and almost every location ends up feeling random in its chokepoints. You get almost no sense of a correspondence between unique places and the flow of gameplay. After a while, it doesn't matter much whether you're in New York or Philly or Chicago or Tampa (though Tampa is FREAKY for the number of gateways it has) except that your access to most places is dependent on how socially active you've been, and the cities tend to have the best battles because there's the largest number of people actually physically able to walk a few blocks and launch an attack on an enemy dominator.

What's missing is that this is a case where you could REALLY make use of player-generated content that didn't involve some awkward mission design system. There's a fuckload of Web 2.0 forms of user-generated locational metadata out there that could be used to make many Shadow Cities gateways and locations have some distinctive features and feel. My house happens to be near a religious retreat that's also a nature preserve: that's knowable either by letting players tag sites within game or by drawing on one or more external sources of metadata. So let it be a gateway that generates special bonuses for Animators or that spawns a special kind of spirit or that lets a player acquire a short-term bonus. Take metadata and identify the corporate headquarters of Google, giving an Architect bonus for holding it. That kind of thing. This game is overlaid on the real world--they should keep it graphically simple but use the richness of the real world and ample amounts of existing metadata to generate a much more interestingly responsive and differentiated gameworld.

Everything Khaldun said is true. I see Shadow Cities more as the groundwork for what could be a great game than a great game right now. It's useful as a time-nibbler if you have ten minutes here and there, but not something that I'd tell anyone is a blast to play for hours at a time. It's just too basic right now. But it has potential, they just need to give it more depth.

My big issues with it happened pretty fast.

1. I like to explore games before I jump into them with other people, so I'm stuck at lvl 4 grinding for hours. Which I could make go faster if I added friends, but I want to figure out how the basics work before tinkering with other people.
2. At lvl 4, I've only been given 8 mana potions so far and I need at least 20 to capture my area. That puts me within 30min of starting the game having to buy shit with real money.

It's got lots of potential that just seems not fully fleshed out.

Capturing an area doesn't give you shit. Literally nothing other than having your name on the gateway. Only after you dump a ton of potions into a gateway do you see any effect, I think fifty is supposed to be the magic number, and it's something pathetic like +1 energy from the dominators attached to it. Not worth it at all.

That's one of the things I hope they straighten out before long in an update, possession of gateways needs to give a more tangible bonus.

Quote from: Hawkbit on July 23, 2011, 08:41:20 PM

Yeah, don't rename a gateway for yourself unless you really like the ego-boost. Also don't hesitate to add friends like crazy--it's the only way to explore and see new places/get into battles.