14 DAY TRIAL // BioWare co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk has revealed in an interview that a fundamental mistake on behalf of the studio has kept Mass Effect: Galaxy from thriving on the iPhone. However, Zeschuk labeled the game as a work in progress, with the development team still learning to tackle some difficulties posed by the particularities of Apple’s touchscreen devices.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com earlier this month at the Develop conference in Brighton, Zeschuk revealed that BioWare had made a 'big mistake' thinking story could carry it.
"Oh, I think it [Mass Effect: Galaxy] was very worth attempting,” Zeschuk stated. “Even when something's not as successful as you'd like, you can take some lessons away and apply them, right? For us, that's kind of where humility comes in, to eat the humble pie on the Mass iPhone game and go, 'Yeeeaaah, we made a big mistake,' in the sense that we thought story could carry it.”
“Maybe it wasn't even a mistake as much as we took a guess, our guess was wrong, and we learned something in the process - that the fundamental tactile gameplay is actually the key thing on the platform," continued Zeschuk. "Unless your game is utterly designed about tactile gameplay, you shouldn't release it. That was good information for us to have."
Even though the title hasn’t been very successful as an iOS game, the studio continues to look at the possibility of taking another blow at it.
"We still poke around on it," said Zeschuk. "At some level we're leaving the expertise on the iPhone to the folks who are experts. We'll explore stuff. For us, it may be things that link into other games. It's the cross-platform nature of the potential platform, like an iPhone app able to somehow access one of the other games' universes, or something. That would be really cool."
"What's interesting is imagining things like the unlocking games on your iPhone,” he added, according to VideoGamer. “Weird stuff like that would be kinda cool. Again, you would use the tactile gameplay. Suddenly you have to pull out your iPhone, to unlock the thing! We wouldn't make it a requirement, but it could just be a neat experience."
