Details on Cancelled Shadow Realms from BioWare Austin

Unseen64, a website that specializes in archiving and publishing information on cancelled games and scrapped/work-in-progress versions of published titles, has published an article on Shadow Realms, a title from BioWare Austin that was announced last year and cancelled at the beginning of this year after months of silence.

So far we have always only known that the title was meant to be a 4v1 online action-RPG set in an urban fantasy version of our world. According to Unseen64’s source, the game’s setting was strongly inspired by the success of book series like Twilight and Harry Potter, and the protagonists would have been young adults wrestling with the new responsibilities brought by their special powers:

With its inspirations heavily set in modern youth fiction, it was the Austin team’s attempt to piggyback the trend brought about by the popularity of such phenomena as Harry Potter and the Twilight series. This mini web series of sorts would have depicted a diverse cast of young adults wrestling with their newfound powers and the responsibility they were reluctantly inheriting. Some would rise to the task, excited by the macabre domain before them, while others would recoil in terror.

You might also remember that according to Kotaku the game was likely to go through a development overhaul and receive a single-player campaign at some point, but Unseen64’s source is confident that mode never got past the talking stages and into implementation. Ultimately, the game was cancelled, in part because of the negative reactions from BioWare’s other studios:

It was in June 2014 that word of the game began to reach the fellow branches of BioWare, as the Austin team started to show off their creation. Our source shared that it was somewhat far along at this point with (decently modelled characters and levels). However, the underlying first impressions of it were distinctly lukewarm among the other offices it was shown to. This made for a stark contrast with the excitement building for another new IP the company was working on, which the developers were greatly enthused about.

(Many YuGiOh jokes were made around the office when we learned of it)

The full article includes a lot of art and screenshots and a lot more information on the game’s central gameplay conceit, free-to-play monetization model, marketing strategy and character customization, so I recommend giving it a read when you have time.

Additionally, if you’re interested in Shadow Realms you might want to read VG247’s Brenna Hillier piece on the game’s cancellation, in which she attempts to analyze the factors that she believes might have led to the project’s ultimate demise. A brief excerpt:

Shadow Realms must have been in the works for quite some time before we ever got a sniff of it, and the EA that threw money at a free-to-play, online multiplayer BioWare IP is not the same EA that cancelled it.

All publishers change over time, of course, as the industry adapts and changes to new technologies, new consumer preferences and business pressures. EA, though, has had a pretty dramatic change: former CEO John Riccitiello was replaced by Andrew Wilson.

We’ve seen several new behavioural patterns since this happened: EA has shortened its PR cycles, become far more willing to delay major projects, refocused on core triple-A games, and shut down several free-to-play projects Command & Conquer and Dawngate.

There’s the kicker: EA under Wilson is totally willing to shut down projects publicly, and isn’t interested in pursuing new kinds of publishing on the PC. That’s not to say it won’t keep bringing its big triple-A games to PC, because it certainly will, but it’s no longer interested in trends like free-to-play, social, MOBA and what-not, which are at home on PC.

Wilson leads an EA that made Shadow Realms public in a corporate culture of cooling ardour towards the kind of experimentation it was built around and an EA that will cancel projects out of hand if they won’t live up to its new, exacting standards.