Shadow Realm Canceled by Bioware

Today, Bioware Austin released a short but sad news post on it’s official website: Shadow Realms, a 4v1 PvP shooter announced in 2014 with the famous “You’ve Been Chosen” trailer has been officially shut down, and all development canceled. The game, in short, will no longer be made.

The reason behind this abrupt shutdown, according to the blog, is that Bioware Austin has set it’s priorities on Dragon Age: Inquisition support, the upcoming Mass Effect 4, and their “primary focus” of Star Wars: The Old Republic. With so many games to focus on, it seemed it didn’t have any money, manpower or time to focus on a brand new IP.

Writes Jeff Hickman, the general manager at Bioware Austin;

“We’ve made the decision to not move forward with development of Shadow Realms. We fully recognize that this news is disappointing to some of our fans, so I want to explain more behind this decision. 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.”

It’s a pity it has to end this way: according to the trailers and the gameplay we saw at last year’s Gamescon, it looked fairly interesting and it had a lot of promise. That said, if you’re going to cancel a game, early, before any real hype has been raised, is the time to do it. Unusual that they should have announced it in the first place if there was ever a chance it would shut down, though… something must have happened we’re not being told…

Oh well. Doubt it matters that much for us.