Shadow Realms – not BioWare’s normal sort of RPG

BioWare enters the 4v1 multiplayer arena, as GameCentral plays the latest game from the makers of Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

Of all the developers we met at Gamescom last month Jeff Hickman was definitely the most excited. He should’ve been out of his wits with worry, as he’d just unveiled BioWare’s first new franchise for five years and one that, unlike a new Mass Effect or Dragon Age, has no guarantee of success. But we’ve rarely seen a developer so enthusiastic about their new game, and that alone has got to count for something.

As often happens we ended up speaking to Hickman, the general manager of Star Wars: The Old Republic developer BioWare Austin, before actually playing the game. Although we had seen a brief hands-off demo the day before.



That had been the first official reveal for Shadow Realms, where to everyone’s surprise it was shown to be a four versus one multiplayer game, something in the manner of Fable Legends and Evolve. That means it’s not a primarily single-player game in the mould of Mass Effect or Dragon Age, but instead an episodic game that will likely be sold something in the manner of Telltale Games titles such as The Walking Dead.


As you’d expect from BioWare the back story is extensive, and the game is split evenly between modern day Earth and a magical realm called Embra. You take the role of an ordinary human suddenly possessed of magical powers (as alluded to in the teaser trailers) and able to fight as one of six character classes: Warrior, Assassin, Wizard, Cleric, Ranger, and Warlock.

Although these sound like stock Tolkien-esque fantasy characters, and Embra itself is a pretty generic fantasy world, your characters start off dressed like normal people and carry a mixture of both modern and magical weapons.

But on top of this a fifth player can take the role of the ‘Shadowlord’, an incorporeal overlord who not only controls the other creatures in a level but can also set-up traps and even close or open various parts of the level to funnel players into particular rooms. Unlike Fable Legends the Shadowlord plays from the same third person view as everybody else, and can take direct control of any of the lesser monsters – or even the boss character.

Shadow Realms – the dungeons of Embra

Playing the game ourselves controlling any of the human characters is pretty straightforward stuff. As Hickman promised in the interview (we weren’t able to find him again afterwards) the action does indeed feel suitably weighty, even if it’s also very simplistic in terms of melee combat. Depending on the specific character you’ve got spells and specialist equipment as well though, not to mention the crowd control and tactical implications of working with three other human players.

Even so the human perspective is that of a relatively standard dungeon crawler, essentially a more zoomed in Diablo. The demo was set entirely in the fantasy world of Embra, in this case a rather generic series of dungeon-like rooms. It’s a shame we didn’t see anything of the modern day setting, or the story elements, but as a proof of concept for the action gameplay it was still reasonably impressive.



That said it’s playing as the Shadowlord which is the most distinctive element at the moment, as you follow around after the human players and try to lay traps and ambushes for them. All the magic and abilities run on a timer, much like a massively multiplayer online game, with the Shadowlord able to set up simple traps and spawn orc-like monsters almost immediately but the wait for a giant demonic dog being considerably longer.

As with all the 4v1 games we’ve played recently being the bad guy is the hardest job when first starting out. And even getting to control the boss at the end (which isn’t as much like Evolve as it sounds, because the boss stage is rather cramped and small) wasn’t enough for us, or anyone we saw playing, to beat the players.

As Hickman points out Shadow Realms isn’t even at the alpha stage yet (you can sign up here to play it when it is) but the basic gameplay is already enjoyable. And although it’s only been announced as a PC game at the moment BioWare are already dropping unsubtle hints that if it’s a hit it’ll also be coming to consoles. And if Hickman’s enthusiasm for the rest of the game are even partially justified then Shadow Realms has every chance of being another major success for BioWare.

Formats: PC

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: BioWare Austin

Release Date: 2015

JH: I haven’t been back to E3 – I try to skip E3 now – I haven’t been back in three or four years.


GC: I like E3, I like being there and thinking you’re going to find out about all these carefully guarded secrets. I hate it when everything leaks out early, in dribs and drabs. I know that’s my business, but it’s no fun.

JH: I’m with you on that. We were struggling with Shadow Realms because the Internet is so good about finding out about trademarks and all that stuff… I mean we’ve been working on this game for a year and a half and we’ve been silent, no-one knew we were even working on a game.

GC: So how do these things leak, in general, is that the development team? Someone who left and perhaps had a grudge?

JH: Who knows, it can be so many different things. For us it was… there are people out there who watch trademark registration sites, and so they saw us register. And we did all sorts of things, we registered a hundred different names at the same time, and it’s like: ‘It might be one of those!’

And then we started to tease it a month ago and then it goes crazy – everyone’s guessing – and people are smart, and they’re like, ‘Huh, so it’s this type of game and I know they just registered a bunch of stuff. Oh, and we dug through all their files and we found this one word, therefore… it’s probably this’.

GC: It was the filename on one of the email images wasn’t it, that gave the name away?


JH: That was it, but you just roll with it. But it’s great to finally come here and people are expecting something, but they don’t know what, and then you get up on stage and… not many times in your life do you actually get to announce a brand new IP from a major developer. And what an honour and a glorious moment, for both me and for the entire team, to just be able to get up there and represent that. It’s really cool.

GC: I like your enthusiasm. It was a fun reveal actually, because everyone was assuming it would be another single-player RPG.

JH: Well that was one of the things that was… we wanted confusion. You look at all these teaser trailers we’ve been putting out there, they’re crazy. And we ramp up this ARG, where we’ve got the community out there – I don’t know if you saw that at all but we had this alternate reality game that we’re playing on the web with the community, along with those teaser trailers.

GC: Oh no, I didn’t realise that.

JH: We had all this mysterious stuff happening… and imagery… and Reddit was involved… it was awesome! The community was super engaged trying to figure out what was going on. And it was all pointing at this announcement.

Shadow Realms – a baseball bat with nails in it is not normal RPG equipment

GC: I’m always arguing that well-known developers should use their fame to make more new IP, that they’re the only ones that don’t have to make sequels because their brand is just as important as the game’s. And it’s interesting that that’s what’s happening here, that people have got excited just because it’s a BioWare game – even though they didn’t know what it was.

JH: Yeah, we’re not just throwing something out there. We sat down… it’s really been two years since we started talking about it. Like, what are we gonna do? What’s the next thing? And you go through that for a lot of reasons. The team wants to go through it, especially with a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic; there are people who have been working on that game, today for nine years. Nine years, think about that.

GC: I am thinking about that!

JH: [laughs] And some of those people, to this day, love working on that game and never want to leave it. But no matter how much you love a thing nine years of anything is enough for most people. So it gives us an opportunity not only to think about… I think it’s interesting too, in that how we go about this. Like two years ago we were saying should we do this for us, should we do this for the players… what is it? And when we start thinking about new ideas it’s not, ‘How do we make money?’ It’s not even, initially, what do the players want? It’s what we want, what are we passionate about?

And that’s the first question we ask ourselves; when we sat down with our creative director James Olen, who’s been instrumental in so many BioWare games in the past. We sit down and James, myself, and everyone else; we all sit down and talk about this stuff. And we ask ourselves: what do we want to do? What would be fun? What are we passionate about? Because I truly believe that if you’re passionate about what you do, especially about art, gaming; your passion will infuse the game. Your passion will drive it to greatness.

And so we’re sitting there talking, and we’re a bunch of guys who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and being that guy sitting around a table with your buddies drinking a beer, with the dungeon master, playing a game. And at the time we were playing… I’m not going to name the name, but we were playing a pen & paper role-playing game.

GC: Oh, name it.

JH: We were playing Pathfinder at the time. [laughs] We were playing a couple of different board games, reading a couple of different books, and we were all kind of doing these things together. We like each other, we hang out together. And we always talked about, when we were sitting around the table back in 1985… we had our Commodore 64s over there but you couldn’t play games on them, not like this – not really. And that’s where games, MMOs and single-player RPGs, evolved out of.

And they’re awesome games but I think that there’s something more that we can bring to that type of gaming, and that’s where this kind of came from. It’s like, what we don’t have is that feeling of a human controlling some of the action. And not just PvP, but literally controlling some of the world and pushing the story in different ways, controlling the environment in different ways. And in some cases playing your nemesis.

And so we started to form this core team and started to experiment with what would work. Could that work? How could that work? And so we know how to build a story. We know how to build a RPG in terms of progression and loot and class systems… but let’s focus on how to make that thing work. That many against one… and who is the one and what does he do? And this whole thing.

We tried all sorts of stuff, we’ve tried multiple Shadowlords versus multiple players, one Shadowlord versus eight players or five. And through that we came upon what seems best: four players, one Shadowlord. And actually two Shadowlords is kind of cool sometimes too… but one Shadowlord! This is where we’re at and what we think flows the best.

And then we said, OK: let’s make the heroes feel cool. And at one point we had 12 heroes and then we had two heroes, but we’ve come upon this six that we have right now. And how does that feel and what’s the plan for the heroes? Combat feels pretty good… have you played it yet?

GC: No, not yet. I’m booked in at three.

JH: It’s really kind of visceral dodging and it’s meaningful. And now what about the Shadowlord? We know the ultimate goal: have him be the dungeon master! But how far can we take that? So we started to take it step by step. So okay, he can place traps, he can do all sorts of crazy things in the environment, he can spawn monsters, he take over monsters and actually fight and handle the players, he takes over the boss at the end with all sorts of special abilities. Could he set the entire spawn system in the dungeon before it starts? ‘I don’t want orcs this time, I want demons!’ The answer’s yes, by the way!

GC: [laughs]

JH: Can he control some of the actual map? I don’t want them to go down that path this time, I want them to go down that path; close this one, open that one. The answer’s, yes. And so you start to go down this thing of, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of cool stuff we can do!’ And so that’s the point where we’re at right now, of we’ve got this really interesting core experience, of four players versus the Shadowlord. These guys are on a variety of missions: go rescue the princess, go kill the demon lord, escape the prison, whatever it is. And the Shadowlord is there to stop them at all costs.

And now the next is… I mean we’re so early. We’re not even at alpha yet. We’re at alpha next month.

Shadow Realms – this is the demon king, the boss at the end of the episode

GC: There didn’t seem to be any indication of a year of release, at the announcement?

JH: We’re about a year out, maybe longer. Depending on what the players say, and that’s the key now. We’ve been developing the RPG elements, deep combat customisation of the characters, and how we’re going to do episodic story. But what we’ve been really focused on for now is this 4v1 and now we get it in front of the player, we let them play, and we listen to the feedback – see where the points of trouble are, the things we can improve on – we do that and then we reveal the next stage.

So that’s okay, here’s the actual character classes, because right now you only get a slice of the character. Here’s the character classes with progression. Here’s all the other abilities, what do you think of that? Was it good? Okay, now here’s the story and here’s how it’s gonna play out. But we’re not gonna reveal the whole story because there’s some… we have what we call episodes and a chapter. So a chapter is a bunch of episodes.

So, I’ve read the first couple of chapters and it’s awesome! They’re such great writers. And it’s all of these great episodes that we’re gonna deliver to the players… we’re still talking about the frequency but let’s just say we want to be as frequent as possible. And we think that that’s pretty frequent. And so you deliver these episodes of story to everyone at the same time, and you cliff-hang off of them and it’s like,’Oh, what’s gonna happen next?’

GC: Perhaps it’s best I haven’t played the game yet because I can say, without reference to the game itself, that I love your enthusiasm. Obviously I talk to all kinds of developers, including those just doing the production line stuff, and it’s horrible to see how bored they can be – or even slightly embarrassed. It’s like they’re screaming inwardly, ‘Get me out of here, I want to do an indie game!’

JH: [laughs]

GC: So in terms of structure the obvious example to offer is how Telltale release their games, is that a fair comparison?

JH: They’re inspirational in their intent, we love that idea of that episodic story like they do. How we’re gonna do it is different, but a similar type of experience from a, ‘I’ve got the story and I’ve done the thing and now I’ve got to wait a little while, you know?’ So you’re definitely gonna see that. Part of what we’re gonna determine is what the right frequency for the episodes are, we think it’s fairly often. We don’t want people to wait too long… ’cause there’s things to do outside of story.

GC: So you can keep playing it and still get new stuff out of it? Because you can’t keep replaying a Telltale game unless you kind of start again.

JH: Exactly, but you can replay this. It’s like, look imagine… in some respects the core of this game is a great dungeon crawl. Whether it’s a literal dungeon in Embra, the fantasy world, or whether it’s a dungeon crawl in New York City subways or the streets of Paris you can go through and you can play through them in a number of different ways, because there’s different missions outside of the story, and the Shadowlord’s with you the entire time, doing different things.

And so you can imagine that there’s this balance between how fun that is, and how engaging that continues to be outside of the story, and how often we drop new story in. And so that’s the pieces, with the help of the community and the alpha, that we need to figure out.

GC: Will the pricing structure also work in a similar way to Telltale? Will you be able to pay for just a single episode or go for a kind of season pass?

JH: [apologetically] I’m not really here to talk about the business model but I’ll say this: when we build a game, in my studio, my philosophy is this. Be passionate about what you do, build a game that you think is gonna be fun, get it in front of the players as fast as you possibly can. We’ve actually had it in top secret outside testing for six months now. We need players to engage with the game.

I don’t care how they pay for it, the game must be a fun, interesting experience. I don’t want the players to worry about money. I don’t want to worry about the money. I want them to worry about having a fun game. If the game is engaging and fun the players will be happy and pay for it. Whether that’s demo it for two days and then pay me $60, whether that’s play for free in the classic sense, whether that’s buy things episodically like Telltale does… we don’t know. We really don’t know.

And my intent is to get the players in the game, show them the game, and then ask them. What do you think? Now I’m not saying we’re going to do exactly what they say, but I want to know what they think.

I remember there’s an indie game that I played on Steam, that was built by a guy in his basement – I don’t know if that’s literally true but it was built by one guy – and it was obviously a work of passion. It looked horrible, the graphics were terrible. It was like me drawing a game. But you play the game and it’s this weird game and it plays so awesome, and you play it… I must’ve played the game for 15 hours.

Shadow Realms – that’s the Shadowlord in the middle

GC: What’s the game? Why are developers so reticent to mention other people’s games? It drives me mad!

JH: It’s not because we’re not allowed… I’ll call this one out. It’s a game called Papers, Please.

GC: Oh, yeah. That’s an amazing game.

JH: Okay, so here’s this game Papers, Please. It’s like… what an awesome game! And I found myself, 15 hours in, going, ‘Oh my god! I’ve got to give this guy my money’. That’s what my philosophy is. I want our players to go, ‘God I love this game, I’m glad, happy… I feel like…’ Our CEO, he has this saying where he says, ‘You always want to feel like the player is getting the most out of the game. You want him to feel like he’s getting way more value than he pays for’. You never want the player to feel like you’re taking from them, and that’s where we lean.

And so we’re gonna build this game, we’re gonna figure out what the right value is, we’re gonna ask the players what they want to do, we’re gonna figure out the right way to monetise it and that’s what we’re gonna do. And I don’t know what that is yet.

GC: That’s a great answer. [laughs] That’s so much better than ‘no comment’.

JH: [laughs] Yeah.

GC: In terms of the things that aren’t combat, how does that work? I did a bit of pen ‘n’ paper in my youth…

JH: Oh yeah? [laughs]

GC: Star Wars mostly, for me. The West End Games stuff. But in that you just made up stuff on the fly, like literally anything. Which I imagine is a bit difficult in a video game.

JH: Yeah, you can’t do that. Like I said, we kind of had this ultimate goal but that’s really hard! So we said, ‘Let’s start back here and work towards that goal and see how close we can get to it’.

GC: So how about the blocking off of routes you mentioned? How does something like that work?

JH: Think about… I hate to call it a map but it’s an area. There’s this area and when the Shadowlord is starting the game and the heroes are getting ready, they’re getting their equipment and they’re talking to each other about what they’re gonna do, the Shadowlord is getting his options.

And so his options will probably – and again this is all stuff we’re still working on – those options will include… remember the Shadowlord is a class, he’s a character in the game. He’s levelling up, he’s earning new abilities, he’s got different specialisations, and so the Shadowlord might be going, ‘You know what, I’m going to play the trap Shadowlord and I’m gonna go pure traps.

GC: Oh, okay. So there’s different classes of Shadowlord?

JH: Oh yeah! It’s one character but he has all these different abilities and so he can choose, every match that he goes into, ‘You know I’m gonna focus on traps, I’m gonna chose the trap abilities’. Or I’m gonna focus on bombs or I’m gonna focus on monster possession, or whatever. So he gets his loadout – he has special magical equipment too – and each one of these things changes how he plays the game.

And so you can imagine the Shadowlord then says, ‘I’ve got my loadout, I know what I’m gonna do, here’s how I want to affect the level. Last time I played through this there were demons, my abilities lean more towards orcs so I’m gonna choose the orcs spawn structure.’ So orcs are gonna spawn for me.

And then we talk about, as he’s going through the level, being able to literally say, ‘I’m in a room, I don’t want that door to open – ever. I want that door to open’. And there you redirect the players in different ways, changing up their play style. So we’ve taken it that far so far. Can we take it further? I dunno yet, we’ll see!

Passing BioWare guy: You’re not lying. I’m listening and you’re not lying.

JH: Am I doing a good job? Thanks.

GC: I’m relieved to find out you’re not making all this up.

JH: [laughs]

GC: So in terms of the wider storyline progression, do you have any player choice in that? Will that work like a traditional BioWare game?

JH: Our intent is to build a story like we do with any BioWare game. You’re going through your story, you’re talking to your NPCs, and you have options, choices, that can branch your story in different ways. Whether it’s options of romance, options of ‘betray this person or let this person die or save this person’, there’s a lot of that stuff going on.

So you can imagine, you’re going through an episode and you’re making your choices and you get to the end of the episode and you get to that cliffhanger and you turn to your buddy the next day at work and you go,’Oh my god, did you play last night?’ ‘Yeah, I did’. ‘What choice did you make?’ Like, awesome!

GC: I always liked that about Mass Effect. Talking to people about what they did and finding out they’d killed someone they didn’t have to.

JH: I know, right? You killed him?! Why would you do that!

GC: Because they’re a sociopath, in the example I’m think of.

JH: [laughs] Exactly.

GC: So it seems you’ve got a double problem with balancing here, because you not only have to make sure the combat is fun between all six classes but you also have to make sure it’s not much more or less fun to be the Shadowlord. How are you handling that?

JH: I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on that right now but we think about that all the time. You can imagine, we think about it all time. We already have a lot of things in place that help to balance combat, and actually help to balance the Shadowlord versus the four players. And we have some plans on how we allow people to play the Shadowlord or not play the Shadowlord, and that kind of stuff. Again, it’s not the sort of thing I want to talk about right now. We want to get feedback on that as we get into alpha.

GC: I’m sure you’re aware that there are a few 4v1 games that have suddenly sprung up, and Fable Legends in particular seems quite similar in concept to Shadow Realms.

JH: Sure.

GC: I’ll be honest I haven’t been very impressed by what I’ve seen so far…

JH: [sustained laughter]

GC: I’m allowed to say that.

JH: You can say that. It’s being built in a different way to the game we’re making, that’s all I’ll say. [laughs]

Shadow Realms – a RPG with heft

GC: But the thing is they’ve got a top-down view for the bad guy, which you could’ve gone with. Why did you chose not to?

JH: We played with a top-down view, that was the very first thing we did. We still like it, but it didn’t work for our game. When we went to third person and made him a character we all kind of went, ‘Ah, yeah. That’s what we want’. Because it makes the Shadowlord feel… so, the hero combat is pretty different. It’s fast-paced, it’s literally button-mash, dodging, blocking – you have to actively play this game. It isn’t an MMO, this is an actual RPG. And the Shadowlord when we pulled him out, he just lost that momentum and feel.

So we actually want the Shadowlord in with the players, even though they can’t see him most of the time he’s constantly… like, if he wants to he can always be playing a monster. If you want to play your Shadowlord just hacking and slashing then play him that way, it’ll be fun and you can spec your Shadowlord to play monsters. And if you want to step back a little bit you can, but we don’t want you out of the game. We want you in the game, in the action, dropping bombs, setting traps, doing crazy stuff, and we don’t want you away from the players. We want that frantic feel.

GC: So the only other game your team has worked on is Star Wars: The Old Republic, is that right?

JH: That’s it.

GC: In that case I’m interested in how you learnt how to make what, in terms of combat, is essentially an arcade beat ’em-up. I’m always interested when a developer suddenly starts doing something they never have before and gets it right on their first go, like the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3. It’s almost as if that implies it’s really easy to make video games!

JH: [laughs] It’s not that.

GC: No, I know. But how do you go about it?

JH: But it’s a good question, these are all great questions. But I think it’s not as much of a stretch as you think it is to the game that we’re making. Probably the biggest difference to the game we’re making is the feel of combat itself. And I can tell you the very first thing we did is we went out and we hired an action combat guy.

GC: What had he worked on?

JH: You know, I don’t know if want to say.

GC: Well, presumably it’s not going to have been something rubbish? But you said that about the ‘feel’ of combat in a very offhand way, and yet the feel is 90% of a game.

JH: You’ve got to check it out, I’m really curious to know what you think of it.

GC: I’m kind of having to give you the benefit of the doubt at the moment.

JH: You are, you are. Because I do actually think it’s quite… because believe you me we have the same concerns…

GC: Melee combat is a very difficult thing to get right, it’s hard even to describe why one game works and one doesn’t – since they all use very similar mechanics.

JH: It is, it is. There’s a feel to it right? I can tell you yesterday was the first time we had people-people get their hands on it. Like complete outsiders; face-to-face, standing on the floor – I was terrified. Because I know how important it is that when I go [mimics swinging an axe, complete with sound effects] it’s got to go [mimes an enemy having an axe cleave through him]. I think we’re close. I don’t think we’re there yet but I think we’re really close. It feels damn good.

GC: I remember interviewing Naughty Dog recently and the guy was talking about judging the gameplay on whether it felt right or not. And he apologised for being vague, but as far as I was concerned that was the perfect explanation – that’s the mark of someone that knows what they’re doing, the difference between art and process.

JH: That’s what I mean by passion, you’ve got to build for yourself. At least a little bit. I can tell you, we play this game in our studio all the time. We have competitions and who’s the best Shadowlord – I can tell you who the best Shadowlord is! – and you look at that and you think, ‘I really like it’.

And now what do you think? I really, really want to know what you think!

GC: [laughs] Well, I’ll try and find you when I come back this afternoon, but you know how it is.

JH: I know, I know. But it’s why we’re bringing people into alpha so early. The next step is… okay, what do you guys think?

GC: What are you going to do if they hate it? Would you change the whole thing?

JH: We’ll change what we need to change. It’s useless to put a game out unless the players are going to engage with it and love it. We’re not in it just for this game, we’re in it for the long run and this game may be one of those long-term games but it’s not the only thing we’re gonna do and we’re learning every step of the way and we’re learning from our players. If our players love it, they tell us what they like, we’ll build them a game they want, everybody wins!

GC: And yet I always worry when I hear a developer talking about that level of fan involvement. I don’t want a game made by a committee of forum users.

JH: Oh no, no, no. We’re not looking for our players to design our game. We have a passion, we have a vision. That’s what we’re delivering towards. But if the players don’t like our passion and vision then something’s wrong and we need to change. But our passion and vision tells me that we’re doing the right thing.

GC: That’s great, I hope I can catch you later.

JH: I hope so, then you can just say, ‘meh’.

GC: I bet it’s no Fable Legends.

JH: [laughs]

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