Shadow Realms - Canceled By BioWare

Seems the rumors from last year were right about development trouble for Shadow Realms as BioWare has announced today the game is now cancelled.

Today I’m sharing some important news about Shadow Realms and our BioWare Austin studio. 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. We’ve got an incredibly talented team here at the Austin studio, and they are excited and already deep on new projects within the BioWare family, ones that will make some great BioWare games even better.

These include additional ongoing enhancements to the award-winning Dragon Age: Inquisition, as well as the next game in the Mass Effect series and other new IP.

But the biggest focus for our team in BioWare Austin will be on Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. As every Star Wars™ fan knows, this is a massive year in the Star Wars universe. We have some great plans for expanding this epic game this year, and look forward to sharing the news about those plans with our players in the coming weeks.

For all the people that registered for the Shadow Realms Closed Alpha, we’re working on a way to say thank-you for signing up. To all those players that gave us feedback at Gamescom and PAX, and those that shared their thoughts and impressions in the past months, we thank you for being part of the conversation.

More information.

Last year there was talk about adding a single-player mode. Now we will get more DLC & Expansions for DA: Inquisition, and Star Wars: The Old Republic instead.

I wonder if the next Mass Effect will be more online focused, or be like DA: Inquisition? I also read this week the next Fallout might be another MMO. I seriously hope not.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Last year there was talk about adding a single-player mode. Now we will get more DLC & Expansions for DA: Inquisition, and Star Wars: The Old Republic instead.

I wonder if the next Mass Effect will be more online focused, or be like DA: Inquisition? I also read this week the next Fallout might be another MMO. I seriously hope not.

At least we got KS RPGs coming in strong and well done.

Shadow Realm was the multiplayer only game right? I seem to recall there being some reason why I more or less ignored it, and that would explain it.

Wasn't that the game with which they were trying to bring the PnP RPG feeling back to online video gaming, with a Dungeon Master and everything? That sounded pretty interesting, actually.

Going by the PR notice, seems like Disney might have given money to EA to add stuff to TOR and they reassigned the Shadow Realms team to the game.

I was not in the slightest interested in this game so i don't really mind if it's been cancelled. Maybe Bioware will actually make a good game in it's place
I still have hopes that we will see Kotor 3 at some point although i doubt it when The Old Republic seems to be one of their first priorities now….

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Last year there was talk about adding a single-player mode. Now we will get more DLC & Expansions for DA: Inquisition, and Star Wars: The Old Republic instead.

Sadly I'm more interested in TOR MMO than in DLC for a game where you fail bears exterminator job.
And I'm not interested in TOR at all.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
[/I]I wonder if the next Mass Effect will be more online focused, or be like DA: Inquisition? I also read this week the next Fallout might be another MMO. I seriously hope not.

Both ME and FO MMO would probably sell for a week or two and then end in a dumpster just like ESO. While FO MMO is definetly coming as that was Bethesda's plan since buying rights and Interplay failing to make one of their own, I don't think Bioware will go into that direction. Not that they wouldn't want to, but because EA already made a mistake with SimCity.

I must remind you that Sims 4 was supposed to be MMO, but after SimCity fail, the whole idea was scrapped and the engine heavily modified so in the end it came out as singleplayer Sims game.

But there is something EA didn't drop out and it almost made into DA3. Phonescams.
The war table in DA3 feels like virtual beggar phonescamming, only in DA3 there is no "please give me $15 to cut the wait time, we here at EA have nothing to eat, we're so poor, please help us buy bread!". Either the begging for real money was cut out in the last minute or they needed one more delay to implement it properly.
Since Dungeon Keeper, Sims Freeplay and DA:Heroes were not removed from phones and are still there begging people for money, that is something with a big chance to appear in ME4.

I don't know why people are missing the obvious, but the MMO craze is largely over. Suits have finally accepted that all those zillions spent on WoW clones aren't making the kind of return they were hoping for.

The result? Hard to say.

Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll see some innovation again with a reasonable budget, but I'm afraid most of the fat men with cigars have given up trying to capture the market and make the next WoW.

So, it'll most likely be small budget MMOs full of bugs and unrealised potential - and a few more F2P cash-grab scams until the genre more or less dies and gets perceived as a big fad that lasted a few decades.

But we can most defintely expect a horde of multiplayer oriented games on a smaller scale.

Also Bioware's attempt at an MMO didn't go well, whereas their single player games have always sold well.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
I don't know why people are missing the obvious, but the MMO craze is largely over. Suits have finally accepted that all those zillions spent on WoW clones aren't making the kind of return they were hoping for.

The result? Hard to say.

Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll see some innovation again with a reasonable budget, but I'm afraid most of the fat men with cigars have given up trying to capture the market and make the next WoW.

So, it'll most likely be small budget MMOs full of bugs and unrealised potential - and a few more F2P cash-grab scams until the genre more or less dies and gets perceived as a big fad that lasted a few decades.

But we can most defintely expect a horde of multiplayer oriented games on a smaller scale.

All we are going to see in the next few years are niche PvP-sandbox oriented crowdfunded MMOs and Asian grinders that might never make it here anyway. That's all that is being made right now outside of EQNext, Armored Warfare (PvP tank game), Starforge (a Russian first game) and Eternal Crusade (a Planetside 2 clone).

Well on the PC at least. I suspect the suits commanded lots of cheap mobile F2P games.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
I don't know why people are missing the obvious, but the MMO craze is largely over. Suits have finally accepted that all those zillions spent on WoW clones aren't making the kind of return they were hoping for.

Unfortunately, I think I have to agree. There's no [seemingly good] mmos in development these days, and the few that had a bit of magic at one point have long since been turned into free to play dreck.

While I'm not entirely pessimistic on the matter, I can only hope a small studio goes back to basics with the genre. Costs can plummet if you shove aside the ubiquitous voice acting, handholding quest design, and obnoxious marketing. Would it be enough to keep the budget closer to ~$25 million rather than $200? I can only hope so as I frankly don't see any innovation coming from the larger, publisher-driven studios.

As for Shadow Realms specifically, I think its cancellation has just as much to do with EA wanting BIOWARE to focus on milking existing IPs as it does with TOR not yielding "forecast" profits. Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Star Wars. Keeps it simple for the EA suits when it comes time to approve projects.

The best MMO's are still MUD's…. you can develop those with a very small budget or as a spare-time project.

I think it could make a very great MMO if it was as good as some of the MUD's but with graphics and such.

The background for the game sounded interesting and I wouldn't mind a proper cRPG using that IP. But the combination of Action RPG and 4v1 MMO isn't a draw for me either.

Awww….a bioware/EA/Origin product that I will not get a chance to mock. There should be more of these opportunities.

Originally Posted by Giovanni1983
I was not in the slightest interested in this game so i don't really mind if it's been cancelled. Maybe Bioware will actually make a good game in it's place

Same. And…

I haven't finished DAI since I kind of lost interest - kind of felt like soloing in a crappy modern MMORPG too much of the time and too many boring/generic solo MMORPG types of activities with boring and weak combat that feels more like spamming autoattack and firing generic and nearly impact free abilities off cooldown and no real strategy or tactics - again, just like a modern crappy MMORPG.

I'm surprised they're doing so much with SWTOR - a game I liked at first but find the F2P model it uses to be amongst the worst of F2P - not that there is any good F2P since F2P sucks beyond measure for MMORPGs (works good with other genres sometimes, like I think the F2P for LOL is excellent).

Every time I've returned to SWTOR (after being an early player, payer, subber) I can't really play without subbing since the F2P completely cripples the game for me and all my past accomplishments and the graphics looked dated when it released and just feel so ancient upon return. I've played several MMORPGs where I bought the game, subbed, and the game went F2P and I'd say all of them do a better job of treating former paying customers well.

I just can't get into the Mass Effect games. I try. I find them boring with clunky gameplay. I loved KOTOR and thought it played very well but even though there is some similarity in how Mass Effect flows for gameplay it's just not the same. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. I enjoy FPS pseudo RPGs like FarCry 3. I love RPGs. Somehow Mass Effect to me is just a bad FPS with very weak RPG elements and as a whole it just doesn't do it for me.

Hopefully their new IP ends up being good but at this point I'm less interested in BioWare's games. I'm not a console gamer and have had about enough of console-first dumbed down console designed games with horrific console-driven UI design.

Considering the whole consoles are going to kill PC gaming fantasies are long gone and PC gaming is very strong now, it would be nice to see developers ditch the whole console-first design crap (along with the console driven dumbing down of everything). It would be especially nice for companies that gained their place in gaming via PC gaming to focus more on quality PC games and less on console.

Originally Posted by Voqar
Considering the whole consoles are going to kill PC gaming fantasies are long gone and PC gaming is very strong now, it would be nice to see developers ditch the whole console-first design crap (along with the console driven dumbing down of everything). It would be especially nice for companies that gained their place in gaming via PC gaming to focus more on quality PC games and less on console.

It is only fantasies for people who redefine what PC gaming means and what killing it could mean.
PC gaming was never about the number of sold games on that platform ( reducing this number to zero is impossible as OS are sold with games), it was about the number of games built on a PC first design.
The PC games market is strong as a second market, where games that are not designed for PC first keep selling. PC design goes even second to mobile/tablet these days.
It will keep that way for long.

I was at the event in Cologne.
My report from there is in this discussion . http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showt…=shadow+realms
I need to find my skullcap again. It got somehow lost.