Rumour has it development on BioWare’s Shadow Realms project has been rebooted, and that the game’s business model has switched from free-to-play to premium.

Several sources spoke to Kotaku about the game, which was announced last August as a 4v1 online action-RPG.

Two sources reported that the game was outright cancelled, but even though its 2014 alpha never materialised, community manager Eric Musco wrote on Reddit in December that Shadow Realms was "absolutely not cancelled".

One source – more reliable and “familiar with goings-on at BioWare Austin” according to Kotaku – said the game was retooled in late October, will now have a full campaign, and will release for current-gen consoles and Windows PC in 2017.

Apparently the reboot comes after a decision to integrate EA's Origin client into the game – a move that would see Shadow Realms get more funding from EA, as the publisher encourages developers to use its own tech where possible. This decision was supposedly made after the cancellation of Dawngate – a game whose funding was restricted because it wasn’t going to use Origin.

Finally, a separate source provided a photo of an internal EA database which shows that the online servers for Shadow Realms were disconnected this week, but on the same day other servers were reserved for something codenamed Trafalgar.