14 DAY TRIAL // BioWare is working hard on quite a lot of projects nowadays, with the biggest and most important ones being Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is set to appear this November, and the fresh Mass Effect title.
However, at Gamescom 2014, the Electronic Arts-owned studio decided to show off a brand new title that it currently has in development at one of its regional teams, in the form of Shadow Realms.
The new title can be described as a cooperative and competitive online role-playing game, pitting four players against a fifth one, much in the same way as another upcoming all-new game – Evolve.
Shadow Realms uses, for the first time in the history of BioWare, a modern fantasy setting, in which regular characters gain magical abilities. As such, you can see an officer worker mage, a policeman knight, and many other such characters. They each have three different abilities governed by cooldowns, not to mention a regular attack.
However, while Shadow Realms can certainly be classified as a cooperative squad-based role-playing game, each encounter also delivers a competitive experience, as the four players take on a fifth one.
In the Shadow Realms mythology, special beings called Shadow Demons wreak havoc and try to kill all the human warriors. They can use all sorts of different abilities in order to do that, from setting up traps in the level to spawning enemy monsters and even possessing one at a time to gain more havoc in the middle of his enemies.
The levels have some randomly generated elements, according to BioWare, but the true unpredictable thing is the Shadow Demon, as players can choose all sorts of different abilities to surprise enemies. From focusing on traps or on monsters, to close quarters area of effect abilities, the studio emphasizes that no encounter will be the same.
The game is still very much in an alpha stage but it's still looking quite good. BioWare emphasizes that it wants to get Shadow Realms into the hands of players as soon as possible so that they can contribute with feedback and help the studio figure out how to polish the game.
It uses the new Frostbite 3 engine and, as you can see in recent Battlefield games or in the upcoming Dragon Age: Inquisition, destruction is quite a big part of the actual gameplay. There are very little places that are shielded from enemies but, once bigger foes such as wolves and other beasts appear, nothing can stand in their way.
As of yet, Shadow Realms doesn’t have a release date but fans can sign up for an alpha on the official website. Invitations are scheduled to start being launched in the following weeks. https://www.shadowrealms.com/register