The Chairman of Frontier Developments, David Braben, believes that Microsoft's Kinect has far more potential than developers realize right now. Speaking to Edge, Braben explained that the Kinect represents a unique opportunity to offer players diverse and engaging experiences.
"We're really just beginning with this in terms of how we can use it," he said. "With these things it takes a while to actually get it to work well. What we've been doing is for the people we expect and hope to play with Kinectimals, we've tuned the experience to be one they will really enjoy."
In fact, Braben believes that to define the Kinect as a casual gaming platform would be a mistake.
"What's interesting here, and I think we saw it a little bit with Nintendogs, is it's a way of appealing to more than just casual or core gamers. One of the things that hasn't got much coverage is that it's got a decent array mic in it. I think that makes a big difference. It can listen to where you are in the room; it knows where you are speaking and what you are saying. You can name your animal and then call it over - that works. But think of the core gamer applications where, just sitting on the couch looking left causes you to look round a corner - that's extremely powerful.
"One of the things that amazes me is if you look at sales of games like Modern Warfare, which is a brilliantly engineered game, it's actually very similar to the previous one. And if you look at it and take a step back it plays in a very similar way to things like Halo and a lot of its predecessors. But what it tends to do is bring in a slightly new mechanic and does it very well. There is scope [with Kinect] to add new, albeit very subtle, mechanics to such a game to make it that little bit more enjoyable. And that can be a major differentiator."
2 Comments
August 3, 2010
I'm just going to walk away.
August 3, 2010
In theory Kinect has a lot to offer gamers of all types, and could provide some interesting gameplay elements. In practice, the hit the CPU takes seems to make using Kinect with any CPU-intensive title just not doable. Witness the initial Kinect offerings... do we see Halo: Kinect? Nope, nor anything like that.
I'm sure developers can get around some of the limitations over time, but only if there's enough of a market base to make the effort worthwhile.