Shady realms, we hardly knew you. Really, we didn’t. It’s been less than six months since the four-on-one, tabletop RPG-inspired dungeon crawler was announced at European Gamescom. But last night, Jeff Hickman, general manager of Bioware Austin, shared the news that the studio has “made the decision not to move forward with development of Shady realms.”
While praising the studio’s work on the concept and player response to early demos during events and internal testing, Hickman said development was halted because “there are other projects the team can work on right now within the BioWare studios for the coming year and beyond.” That includes continuous improvements to Star Wars The Old Republic And Dragon Age: Inquisitionbut also new Mass effect games and “other new IP.”
Shady realms represented a change of style from BioWare’s usual lone, story-driven RPG epics. The project focused on online multiplayer battles between a dungeon master setting traps and a team of up to four adventurers working on it, in the style of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. Oh well… we’ll always have the announcement trailer to remind us of what could have been.