Famous for RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, game studio Bioware is teasing something a little different with a mysterious website called "You've Been Chosen," along with a teaser trailed titled "Nightmare."
The live-action trailer, filled with surreal imagery and a creepy man with smoke shooting out of his neck, seems to make hints at exploring the human mind, specifically dreams and nightmares. The end of the trailer uses the tagline "What really happens when we sleep?"
Websites like Seeking Henna and the site for a fake college by the name of the Woods Watson Institute of Higher Learning also tie into the teaser trailer and point towards a fairly extensive viral marketing campaign. Seeking Henna is a blog post by a character named Blake asking for help in finding his missing friend, who mysteriously disappeared two years without a trace from her home despite being wheelchair bound.The two originally met online on the puzzle subreddit, but when Blake receives a mysterious handwritten note he becomes convinced she is still alive. To find her he will be releasing riddles for her to solve and is asking other problem solvers for help.
The Woods Watson Institute site also provides a few clues. It seems Henna before her disappearance frequently visited the Woods Watson webpage, though how exactly the fake college fits into the equation is currently unknown. One professor at the Institute, Dag Folstad, specializes in how minds process events and how those memories results in the writing and telling of history -- a topic that seems especially relevant to the theme of dreams and the human mind.
So what is all this? All signs point at this being Bioware Edmonton's new and previously unannounced IP. Bioware employee Aaryn Flynn at E3 told IGN that the studios next project would be starting fresh.
"When you work on a new IP," Flynn said, "it's a chance to have a clean sheet of design and start at the most fundamental set of principles you can have."
Bioware executive producer Casey Hudson also teased that the new game wouldn't tell a singular story, and the company aims to tell "contemporary stories, and yet we want to build a world a world that is as big and as imaginative as anything we've ever done before." Will this new game be a kind of RPG that Bioware is famous for, or something new entirely. And how does the augmented reality game Seeking Henna tie into things? Expect more to be revealed at Germany's Gamescom in August.
