14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming Dance Central 3 from Harmonix is a Kinect-powered game that will deliver the exact experience the team has advertised and that’s mostly because of the rigorous testing the team has done and the feedback received from players.
Matt Boch, the project director working on Dance Central 3 at Harmonix, stated, “Design isn’t about thinking your template works because you can implement it. You can’t stop at ‘Oh, it works for me’. Put the user experience first and figure out just how much of your game is playable. It can’t just be people working at the studio who step in front of the Kinect. We have a lot of people come in to play our games.”
He added, “Kinect experiences change depending on people’s awareness of their own movements and you need to tune for that. You can’t just take a standard game concept and bolt it onto Kinect. Embrace what Kinect can do.”
Boch has pointed to the Double Fine created Happy Action Theater as being one of the games that managed to use motion tracking well.
Of course, some players have seen the Double Fine Xbox title as more of an interactive show than a full-blown video game and they maintain that Kinect can only be currently used for such experiences.
In Dance Central 3, gamers will have access to new songs and new dance routines and they will be able to import all tracks from the previous installments in the series.
Dance Central 3 will be launched on October 16 in North America and on the 19th in Europe and in Japan, and the game will only be offered on the Xbox 360.
Rumors have suggested that Microsoft is working on integrating a better motion tracking system into its upcoming Xbox 720.