BioWare working on "small scale MMO"

Mass Effect creator BioWare is working on a "small scale MMO".

BioWare is also exploring Flash, browser and iPhone games, although these may never see the light of day.

"On a big basis, what's working in business?" BioWare co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk asked during his keynote presentation at the Develop Conference this morning.

"Every year it's a little bit down. You can't blame the economy anymore. Really, it's about online. We're obviously working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, a big MMO. But we're working on smaller MMO type game games across the group - things all over the space.

"We explored lots of different kinds of games. We did some Facebook stuff. We did an iPhone game for Mass Effect. It wasn’t the best one – people point that out to us. We learned the hard way. The learning there was you have to iterate. The team went back and made some more games that we never released that were way better. Large scale MMOs. Small scale MMOs. We're going to continue to do triple-A console, but we're also going to be exploring pretty aggressively."

BioWare is known for its blockbuster games including Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It's upcoming online game Star Wars: The Old Republic is set to be one of the biggest MMOs ever created.

But BioWare is preparing to broaden its output.

"The future isn't necessarily on console," Zeschuk said. "That's the past. It's going to be a strong thing going forward, but the future is in all of these new businesses that are starting up.

"There will be some stuff you'll see down the road, within the next year, that shows what we're doing in that regard."

After his presentation, Eurogamer asked Zeschuk to describe the kind of game the "small scale MMO" may turn out to be.

"It can be almost anything," he said. "I used to play this game called O Game, by Gameforge. The galaxy is spinning away on some server and you're just poking at it in HTML and moving space ships around. That's an MMO. So it could be almost anything.

"We want to expand because, you look at what kids are playing on. Kids are playing on iPhones and iPads. The 3DS looks pretty amazing. All these platform options, we want to be touching on all those. We did one DS game. We actually had another DS game in development at one point but decided to hold off on that and look at iPhone instead.

Zeschuk's comments need not concern BioWare's veteran fans, however. Zeschuk said BioWare "is still going to do the giant stuff".

Expect more from Zeschuk, and the Develop Conference, throughout the week.