Shadow Realms Announced By BioWare

Electronic Arts and BioWare have announced the new game that they've been teasing for a while and it's called Shadow Realms. It's a role-playing game with tabletop properties and aims to bring gamers a supposedly unique episodic adventure with action gameplay mechanics in a modern-fantasy setting.

The news comes courtesy of the official Shadow Realms website where it's revealed that the game will be a four-vs-one multiplayer game where players will battle against an evil force known as The Shadowlord.

The game shares similarities to Turtle Rock Studios' Evolve, where four of the hunters are controlled by other players and they must work together to team-up and take down another enemy player whose main goal is to disrupt and dispatch the other players.

Jeff Hickman, General Manager and Vice President at BioWare Austin commented about the game saying...

Players will be able to take control of six different classes, including the Ranger, who uses long-ranged combat and creature summoning to aid them in battle; a Warlock who seems to have crowd control abilities to bind demons and use projectile attacks; a Cleric who uses modern and ancient weaponry to help aid teammates... the Cleric is the resident healer; a Wizard who can control elements to harm enemies or buff other players; an Assassin who works as the stealthy and agile fighter who can easily dodge attacks and launch deadly counter-attacks; and the Warrior who is the basic tank and DPS of the group.

The last class is the opposing force that the four players will have to battle against... The Shadowlord. Not much is said about this class but it's described in similar fashion to the bug-class from the game BattleSwarm, where the player takes on a sort of overlord role like in a real-time strategy game, prompting the other four players to work together to take down the enemy forces.

The whole modern day, dark fantasy take on the asymmetrical multiplayer gimmick seems very similar in theme to Funcom's Secret World. Hopefully BioWare manages to make this title a lot more engaging and worthwhile than the aforementioned MMO.

Right now the studio appears to be recruiting players to join the game's alpha. There are no gameplay videos available and nothing really concrete to go on, so for now the game's biggest draw is in its attachment to BioWare as a studio and Electronic Arts as a publisher (for whatever that may or may not be worth).

There's absolutely nothing I've read from the wordy descriptions that make me even remotely interested in this game... at all. But if you want to learn more or sign up for the game's alpha test, you can check out the details over on the official Shadow Realms website.