Matt Rhodes, art director at BioWare, spent the holidays sending in some interesting concept art from Revolver, a project that has never seen the light of day.
Revolver was first conceived as a 2005 follow-up Jade Empire which has gone through several iterations. The developers eventually abandoned the old Chinese sci-fi scene and moved from a martial arts RPG to something more open before the game was silently canceled around 2009. Fortunately, a ton of early concept art still exists for the project.
“Between 2005 and 2008 I worked on Project Revolver, ”Rhodes, whose posts were brought to our attention by Eurogamer, writes on Instagram. “Starting your life as a sequence of Jade Empire, Revolver evolved and changed course many times over the course of its development. It was recently revealed in more detail in the book Bioware: stories and secrets from 25 years of game development. To celebrate, I combed through the archives and dusted off 15 of some of my favorite pieces from that project. “
Since then BioWare has focused almost entirely on its Mass effect and Dragon Age franchises (we don’t talk about Hymn), but I like to imagine a world where Jade Empire has been successful enough to provide a reliable third column in its portfolio.
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Be sure to check out Rhodes’ Instagram and ArtStation pages for more. The uploads for the first one are especially intriguing, as the captions include some small pieces of tradition.