BioWare art director Matt Rhodes spent the vacation uploading some interesting concept art from Revolver, a project that never saw the light of day.
Revolver used to be first conceived as a follow-up to 2005 Jade Empire that have gone through several iterations. The developers eventually dropped the old Chinese setting for sci-fi and switched from a martial arts role-playing game to a more open world before the game was quietly canceled around 2009. Fortunately, a lot of early concept art still exists for the project.
“Between 2005 and 2008 I worked on Project Revolver, ”Rhodes, whose messages were first brought to our attention by Eurogamer, writes on Instagram. His life began as a sequel Jade Empire, Revolver evolved and changed course during its development. It has recently been revealed in more detail in the book Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development. To celebrate, I searched the archives and blown dust off some of my favorite pieces from that project for 15 years. “
BioWare has since gone almost completely on its own Mass effect and dragon era franchises (we’re not talking about Hymn), but I like to imagine a world where Jade Empire was 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 to the former are especially intriguing, as the captions contain some small bits of knowledge.