BioWare Artist Shares Concepts for Canceled Revolver Project

BioWare Artistic Director Matt Rhodes spent the holidays downloading interesting art concepts from Revolver, a project that never saw the light of day.

Revolver was first designed following on from 2005 Jade empire which has undergone several iterations. The developers finally ditched the old Chinese sci-fi framework and went from a martial arts role-playing game to something more open-ended before the game was quietly canceled around 2009. Fortunately, a ton of early concept art still exists for the project. .

“Between 2005 and 2008, I worked on Project RevolverRhodes, whose messages were first brought to our attention by Eurogamer, written on Instagram. “Beginning his life as a sequel to Jade empire, Revolver has evolved and changed course several times throughout its development. It was recently revealed in more detail in the book Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development. To celebrate, I scoured the archives and dusted 15 years of dust on some of my favorite pieces from this project.

BioWare has since focused almost entirely on its Mass Effect and Dragon age franchises (we are not talking about Anthem), but I like to imagine a world where Jade empire was successful enough to provide a reliable third column in their portfolio.

Make sure to check out Rhodes’ Instagram and ArtStation pages for more. The downloads to the former are particularly intriguing, as the captions include a few small bits of knowledge.