The unprecedented concept art from the canceled BioWare Revolver project was posted online by artist Matt Rhodes.
Revolver, a spiritual successor to the Jade Empire, was never officially announced. Pieces and pieces about it have emerged over the years, before BioWare finally went into detail about the game in its recent 25th anniversary book.
Set in the near future, the project was designed to spread BioWare’s trademark narrative and efforts directed at characters in a more open world and with a heavy action setting. Huh, it looks familiar.
Let’s take a look – and click on each gallery for more:
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“Starting his life as a Jade Empire sequel, Revolver has evolved and changed course many times over the course of its development,” wrote Rhodes. “This 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 files and blew 15 years of dust off some of my favorite pieces from this project.”
In development for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 around 2005 to 2008, Revolver had grandiose plans to make the BioWare formula work in a sandbox environment that you could park and explore at will. Characters and missions were designed to be found in a non-linear narrative.
When the scope of the project became clear, BioWare enlisted the help of Big Sandwich Games, a studio populated by former Rockstar Vancouver employees, to work on the game’s open world elements. But eventually the project was quietly canceled, and BioWare focused its efforts on the imminent release of Dragon Age: Origins and, a year after that, Mass Effect 2.
Here are a few more pieces of art – and there’s more on Rhodes’ Instagram and ArtStation:
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