As someone who spends most of his time on an iPad playing strategy games, and as someone who when not playing them on an iPad is playing them on a PC, when I had the chance to speak with Johan Andersson, the Studio Manager of Paradox’s internal development team, there was one thing I needed to know above all others.
When can we hope/expect to see Paradox’s blend of grand strategy titles (ala Crusader Kings, Victoria, Europa Universalis) – a type of game only currently available on the PC – come to the iPad?
“Yes, we definitely want to do that!”, he replied enthusiastically. “However, with current machines, our games would not work that easily, as they require a fair bit of memory. So I’d expect us to have to do pretty creative engineering to handle it, because we can’t do stuff like removing features or making less countries playable, as that would not be a Paradox Development Studio game.”
“Our games are supposed to be complex and fun”, he continues. “I’d expect a game like our political simulator Victoria II would actually be the easiest to port, especially when it comes to interface. Since the gameplay there when you try and steer your country through the industrialisation and the political reforms is a lot about “nudge these values, let time fly to see effects and watch your people revolt against your government”. So we´ll see what the future holds when it comes to iPad games.”
Victoria II on an iPad? We can only dream. But what about other platforms that aren’t a PC? Paradox as a publisher is already dabbling in consoles, with games like Lead and Gold and the upcoming A Game of Dwarves, but those are very different beasts to its traditional PC titles that are, well, about as “PC” as a game can get.
“Well, a large part of the development-team have worked on consoles before and we all definitely prefer PC”, Andersson tells me. “Because PC gives us the freedom to create the games we want to create and make them just as we want them to be.”
“We hope they come across as grand, fun and challenging and were not sure we could make that on console. If the industry changes, I don’t know.. ”
Paradox fans, I’ll have more from my interview with Andersson in the days to come.
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