Last year a collection of mysterious videos were released teasing a brand new game from Mass Effect and Dragon Age creator BioWare. No one had a clue what they were for, but the viral marketing campaign was effective in getting gamers excited.

Unfortunately that excitement died quickly for many when the game was revealed as being a four versus one online co-op game titled Shadow Realms, in which you and three other players would team up to take on a powerful player-controlled enemy (or you alone would take on four others). As it turns out, interest in the game was apparently even lower than thought, as BioWare has announced that they’re actually canceling it entirely.

You can read BioWare’s full statement on the surprise announcement below.

Today I’m sharing some important news about Shadow Realms and our BioWare Austin studio.

We’ve made the decision to not move forward with development of Shadow Realms. We fully recognize that this news is disappointing to some of our fans, so I want to explain more behind this decision.

While the team did amazing work on the game concept and we got lots of great feedback from our fans at events and through other game testing, right now there are other projects for the team to work on within the BioWare studios for the coming year and beyond. We’ve got an incredibly talented team here at the Austin studio, and they are excited and already deep on new projects within the BioWare family, ones that will make some great BioWare games even better.

These include additional ongoing enhancements to the award-winning Dragon Age: Inquisition, as well as the next game in the Mass Effect series and other new IP.

But the biggest focus for our team in BioWare Austin will be on Star Warsâ„¢: The Old Republicâ„¢. As every Star Warsâ„¢ fan knows, this is a massive year in the Star Wars universe. We have some great plans for expanding this epic game this year, and look forward to sharing the news about those plans with our players in the coming weeks.

For all the people that registered for the Shadow Realms Closed Alpha, we’re working on a way to say thank-you for signing up. To all those players that gave us feedback at Gamescom and PAX, and those that shared their thoughts and impressions in the past months, we thank you for being part of the conversation.

Jeff Hickman

General Manager, BioWare Austin

The announcement comes as a bit of a stunner as Shadow Realms was already playable in August of last year when the game was unveiled, as we saw in the brief gameplay demo at the bottom of the game reveal post. Unless of course that playable demo was all that had been created at the time, one has to assume quite a bit of work had been done before this decision was made.

Are you disappointed that Shadow Realms has been canceled?

[Source: BioWare]