Jade Empire: SE - Spiritual Successor cancelled

Eurogamer reports that the spiritual successor of Jade Empire has been cancelled:

Cancelled BioWare project Revolver shown in concept art

A near-future successor to Jade Empire.

Previously-unseen concept art from cancelled BioWare project Revolver has been posted online by artist Matt Rhodes.

Revolver, a spiritual successor to Jade Empire, was never officially announced. Bits and pieces about it surfaced over the years, before BioWare finally went into detail on the game in its recent 25th anniversary book.

Set in the near-future, the project was designed to spread BioWare's trademark narrative and character-driven efforts across a more open-world and action-heavy setting. Huh, sounds familiar.

Let's take a look - and click through each gallery for more:

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Thanks henriquejr!

More information.

Some pretty nifty concept art. Too bad it was cancelled. It looks a lot more interesting than the last couple of Dragon Age games were.

Re-post and More info.

Revolver (Jade Empire 2) Cancelled

Revolver is the codename for an ambitious action RPG that was in development for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 by BioWare with the help of Big Sandwich Games. The project started around the same time as they were working on the first Mass Effect for Xbox 360 (announced in October 2005). While Mass Effect would have been their major exclusive for Microsoft’s home console (PC version of ME was released 6 months later), Revolver was meant to be their new multiplatform series and many resources were put into the project, taking about 5 years to develop.

Link - https://www.unseen64.net/2019/12/02/…re2-cancelled/

Site seems dead at the moment.

Apparently people were progressively pulled from the projet to work on others. Seems like a familiar pattern, especially at Bioware.

The Bioware's 25th anniversary book written by Ben Gelinas has quite a few early art designs and piece of info on that cancelled game as well as others, like Agent. For those who like such things, the book is quite interesting, even if it's not always very well written (and sometimes not entirely correct, but then it's been made by Bioware). It's full of concept art, side stories and amusing or interesting little facts.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
Site seems dead at the moment.

Nope link didn't copy past correctly. Basically another forum error.

I shared the link instead of embedding it again.

It wasn't cancelled, it was sold to SEGA and re-branded as Yakuza.

Sounds like it may have suffered a premature boot to the head. Too bad, it might have been glorious.

Originally Posted by Zloth
It wasn't cancelled, it was sold to SEGA and re-branded as Yakuza.

That looks *much* better than Yakuza imo.

Jade Empire was amazing! Concept art means nothing, tho. Its the 3D content that counts. Since 2005 TALENT was needed for the amazing Mass Effect 1-3 series. If people were pulled from JE, probably this was a sensible decision.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Some pretty nifty concept art. Too bad it was cancelled. It looks a lot more interesting than the last couple of Dragon Age games were.

It does.

At some point before Jade Empire, they were considering making a martial arts-oriented gameplay with the Baldur's Gate engine, in which players could stack attack and blocking moves. They made a demo but it didn't go further (Five Finger of Death).

And the Agent game that was also canceled seemed very promising too, it was an espionage theme this time. A curious mix, very action-oriented apparently: "At the core of the experience was a visceral combat system. The stealth you might expect from a spy game was deemphasized in favor of hand-to-hand combat. Instead of a loose fighter, we wanted it to be much more kind of brutal MMA-ish, punches that landed hard […] If players wanted to choke out a character in a fight, they needed to do the work". And also, "Players would not only need to choose conversation options to direct the outcome of a conversation, but watch for tells in the faces and body language of charracters"

They explored really different themes and gameplay styles, it's quite impressive!

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Nope link didn't copy past correctly. Basically another forum error.

I shared the link instead of embedding it again.

It's working now. I still have to read it but it looks like a wealth of info, thanks!

These guys cancel more games than most studios develop.

Well, 25 years is a long time.

Yeah, would be nice to have some list with developers and their projects that didn't make it to an official announcemet.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
Well, 25 years is a long time.

Yeah, Cloud Imperium could make two games in that amount of time!

I enjoyed Jade Empire… would have liked to see a sequel. Oh well, probably would have sucked.

Par for the course, Bioware-wise. The industry has moved on.

Originally Posted by JDR13
That looks *much* better than Yakuza imo.

Yakuza is about humor and mature themes.
Not about looks.

Originally Posted by screeg
These guys cancel more games than most studios develop.

EA, I guess, cancels more than Bioware does - but that's rather a suspicion than a belief or thought.

Originally Posted by joxer
Yakuza is about humor and mature themes.
Not about looks.

Concept art is mostly about looks - to get a project running. "Head cinema", so to say.