Shadow Realms was to be a 4 against 1 action role playing game, developed by BioWare a company famous for titles such as: The Dragon Age games, Mass Effect games and some Star Wars stuff. As well as many more.
So a company with that kind of footing, who in all honestly makes fantastic RPGs with incredible detail and story, should have no issue making a new IP with a whole new story to captivate us. Yeah they cancelled it. This would be fine, some things don’t work out but at the least it would be great to see a decent reason from the developers.
BioWare made a huge fuss about Shadow Realms in the run up to last year’s Gamescom event, finally unveiling the new game as an episodic, 4 vs. 1 online action role-player. It then disappeared into obscurity again and little more was said.
Shadow Realms was actually already playable at Gamescom last August and worked pretty well. The game showed a lot of promise at this time, it was fun to play the scenery looked amazing it generated a lot of hype. Then last month we heard it was undergoing a rethink and losing the episodic idea (fantastic episodic games are awful) and gaining a bigger budget. Bigger budget now means no budget.
“We’ve made the decision to not move forward with development of Shadow Realms,” said Hickman on the BioWare blog, ‘While the team did amazing work on the game concept and we got lots of great feedback from our fans at events and through other game testing, right now there are other projects for the team to work on within the BioWare studios for the coming year and beyond.’
No reason is offered for the cancellation, with Hickman instead stating that BioWare Austin will refocus its efforts on massively multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, implying that it will get some new The Force Awakens-related content. The team will also be working on ‘additional ongoing enhancements’ to Dragon Age: Inquisition, as well as the new Mass Effect and ‘other new IP’.
So they aren’t doing nothing, they are just going to continue to churn out more content for games that went stale a very long time ago, oh and start a whole new project which let’s be honest will probably end up being canned as well for yet another Mass Effect game.
I hope to be able to update this article with the real reason it was cancelled but until then I shall assume that BioWare has joined the ranks of lazy AAA developer content to do the bare minimum to existing titles, and somehow convince us they made a new game and we should pay them all our money. We all know we will.