Editorial: How Kinect Could Improve Marquee Franchises
by Chris Arnone, posted on 13 December 2010 / 2,230 Views
When most of us think of Microsoft's Kinect or motion controls in general, the games that come to mind don't have a hardcore following. So far the games have been aimed at the casual gamer and at family-friendly multiplayer experiences. While titles like Kinect Adventures, Kinect Sports, and Dance Central may be fun, they aren't marquee titles that get millions of fans psyched up for the next high-production value sequel.
This is paired with a common train of thought: there are Kinect games and non-Kinect games.This doesn't have to be entirely true, however. Forza 4 was recently announced to include some sort of Kinect functionality and it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of first-party titles from Microsoft start doing this as well. The big question is: how?
Halo
I'm going to start with the biggest one first. Halo is THE system seller for the Xbox 360 and looks to remain so even with Master Chief retired. How does Kinect fit in?
First would be during the single-player campaigns. While in multiplayer we're usually strapped in to our headset and talking strategy with our friends, we have no need for a headset in single-player. The Kinect's voice control capabilities could be useful for barking orders to a squad without taking our hands off one of the sticks or a using a headset. "Fall back!" "Move forward!" These and others could make for a great emmersive experience in Halo.
The other place to use Kinect is in the ever-popular video editor of Halo. Everyone likes to talk about how Minority Report-like the Kinect could be and this would be a perfect implementation. Zooming in and out, swinging the camera around, moving the camera in space, all this would be very intuitive if you were just interacting with the screen using your hands in a multi-touch setup.
Voice control over a squad is nothing new, of course, but it's yet to be implemented really well. Halo with Kinect could change that.
Fable
Peter Molyneux's big franchise has brought in some great sales as a highly-accessible RPG that caters not just to the hardcore, but to the masses. Even my lady friend spent some quality time in Albion.
The first and most obvious way you could use Kinect in Fable is in mini-games. Fable has its share of these little jewels: blacksmithing, social interaction, managing properties, etc. Some of these less action-oriented elements could be implemented through Kinect rather than the controller. We tend to make most of our social interactions with our faces and voices anyway, rather than with a the A or Y buttons.
You could also, like in Halo, give voice commands. These could be commands to the dog, deepening the repitoire of what the dog is capable of. Kinect could also be used to interact with your butler if the Fable III menu system is brought back.
Molyneux has already been talking about Kinect and is surely already brainstorming what he can do with the new tech in or out of Fable.
Mass Effect
Bioware's universe-spanning space opera has improved drastically with each release. It's taken itself from a good PC game port to a must-have title for the Xbox 360. In a world of super-advanced technology, surely Kinect has its place.
Again, with a squad-based game, voice commands for the squad could be very useful. The game has stuck with d-pad commands so far, but in the thick of a firefight, you rarely want to take your thumb off that left stick. Using your voice would be much more effecient.
An innovative way for Mass Effect to use Kinect would be hacking. The series has used fairly simple minigames combined with stats to accomplish hacking thus far. Now imagine a computer screen coming up that demands your interaction with it. This could be a combination of hand-movements and voice commands, taking hacking from a simple minigame to a core gameplay element.
Hacking, as with several of these Kinect uses, could also find a mirror on Playstation with Move, giving the two consoles some separation based on their motion-control value-adds.
Rock Band
The music game genre may be struggling in sales, but there's no doubt the Rock Band franchise is still a headliner. The game has recently added more features than current consoles can really keep up with, so how would a new title possibly improve upon the already robust features of Rock Band 3?
Stage presence. With any band's live performance, how they behave on stage is as much a factor as how well they play their music. If Led Zeppelin played their entire set while sitting in ergonomic chairs, you'd walk away from that concert feeling cheated. Kinect could watch you play. If everybody is just sitting on the couch, you'd garner poor stage presence scores versus the whole band (except for the drummer, naturally) up on their feet rocking with more than just their fingers. Kinect can currently only track two people, but hey, patches happen.
This won't be what brings back the music genre, by any means. The last thing people want to do right now is add more peripherals to their music game expense, but when added to a solid lineup of other games with Kinect support, this could be gold.
These aren't all the marquee titles, of course. The point is, we hardcore gamers look at Kinect as something less than worthy of our attentions. We see it as a piece of hardware trying to bite into the Wii's motion-control pie. But the fact is the Wii is slowing down. Casual gaming is big but it doesn't bring in the return customers like the loyal hardcore fanbase. Kinect features can be introduced as optional elements of hit titles to add a layer of added fun we didn't even know could exist before.
So hold judgment. Let's play the game of wait and see together. Let's wait and see if developers are taking notice of the potential they have in front of them and execute it well.
Disclaimer: This article is the work of one writer, and does not necessarily reflect the views of gamrFeed or VGChartz.
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