Speaking at GDC Europe, Ubisoft creative director Jason VandenBerghe presented the idea that motion control must become standard and multiplatform in order to make sales worthwhile.
Using analog input, VandenBerghe believes, restricts developers. “For most of early game development, this was all we had,” he explains, pointing towards a digital joystick. “Have you ever f**ked up pushing a button? Binary input is like drag racing. You have to hit the accelerator and keep going in a direction and not turn. It's not hard.”
“Then analogue control was introduced, and this sustained us for 15 years. It's worked great. If button pushing is like drag racing, analogue input is like Formula 1. You're still on a track, though, and there are still guardrails. We're in Baha buggy land with motion control. We can go wherever we like. There's not even a finish line. Players can do whatever they want, and they do.”
“Motion control is profoundly different. It's screwed up the entire industry! The most important feature is the absolute, utter lack of guardrails. This turns the human being holding the controller into the constraint, and this makes a designer's life a living nightmare.”
The main obstacle for motion control developers, says VandenBerghe? The gamers. Developing Red Steel 2 was a major headache, as testers could not figure out how to perform motion controls. “The result was chaos. Absolute random chaos. People would drop the controller in disgust; tell us the Wii MotionPlus doesn't work, that's what people would say. Of course it works. It works just fine. We were making the mistake.”
To get around this obstacle, developers must be teachers. Besides the normal tutorials present within most games, “We make lessons, not tutorials. We are teachers, not designers. This is how you teach karate, it's how you teach dance, and it’s how you teach any physical activity. When you're learning a physical skill, boredom is the target,” he jokes. “It's the goal. When your player's going okay, I get it, it means that it's in their brain.”
Red Steel 2 was a learning experience. Though the game received generally favorable reviews, sales were rather lackluster. VandenBerghe asserts that the problem stemmed from the players. “I isolated this factor called audience willingness. There is a small group of people that is willing to get up and move and exert themselves for fun ... We had to ask ourselves: how many gamers are willing to move? I don't know how many there are, but it's no higher than 20 percent. That's actually probably optimistic.”
As motion controllers become more universal, gamers will start to accept the control interface, and the development costs will become more and more worth it to developers. “Things might suck now, but I think they'll get better,” he grins. “If they put motion control standard in the box, suddenly the model expands. THAT is money.”
“My recommendation to you is that you should ship on multiple platforms. Nobody will want you to. Sony won't, Microsoft won't, Nintendo won't. But the market will... Many genres will remain unchanged, and some people will still not want to exert themselves. But if the hardware remains an add-on, motion control will remain niche."
[Thanks Edge]
