14 DAY TRIAL // One of the executives at Rare, a video game creator working with Microsoft on titles for the new Kinect motion tracking device, has said that initially his team and game designer Peter Molyneux were not convinced that the system could work without a physical controller and tried to convince Microsoft to add one.
George Andreas, who is the creative director at Rare, has told the magazine Edge that, “We were absolutely adamant that we needed a button, something with haptic feedback, that would initiate an action. It took a long time - we threw some prototypes together and then we saw you didn't need one.”
Andreas says that the developers at his company were not the only ones rooted in a traditionalist to control schemes on home gaming consoles.
Apparently the creator of the Fable series was also opposed, with Andreas saying, “We were very vocal to Kudo at the time, and Peter Molyneux was as well, that you needed something in your hand.”
Recently Sony, through one of the leading figures that worked on the PlayStation Move, stressed the fact that its motion tracking device is more flexible and can cover more gaming experiences because the fact that it has a controller with buttons and even a sub controller.
The danger for Microsoft is that gamers will see the technology behind Kinect as revolutionary but will prefer to pick up the Move, which launches this month, because they see it as being more reliable and offering access to more hardcore experiences, like the upcoming Killzone 3.
Kinect will be launching in the United States on November 4 and Microsoft plans to launch a variety of more casual minded titles, like Kinectimals, on the same day.
Both Sony and Microsoft are hoping that their motion systems will gain followers fast and that will convince more game developers to create titles for them in 2011.