14 DAY TRIAL // Those who are playing Mass Effect 3 on the Xbox 360 home console from Microsoft have a chance to use the Kinect motion tracking system to control some aspects of the game, and one leading developer working on the game says the integration happened mostly by accident.
Casey Hudson, who is the leading producer working on Mass Effect 3, has told the Official Xbox Magazine that a programmer “realized that with the software that comes with Kinect, it was very easy to connect something that you can do in the game with something you’ve said, almost as easy as that.
“No research required – it was all there, done for us. We started thinking about what we could actually achieve with that.”
Members of the team came up with a number of ideas that would allow players to concentrate on the movement of their own characters while also giving them a chance to interact with their squad.
Hudson says that the level of Kinect integration in Mass Effect 3 is still limited, but that in many ways the technology cannot be separated from interactive storytelling in the future.
The developer added, “You’re just talking to a character, and you’re going deeper into their conversation, asking them questions and telling them things and after it’s over you pick up the controller, and it’s a cold piece of plastic, and you think ‘this is the old way, and what I was doing was the future’.”
Since its 2010 launch, the Kinect has managed to move more than 10 million devices to gamers, and Sony has reported slightly lower sales numbers for its Move motion tracking system.
So far, their use has been limited in mainstream titles, but rumors suggest that motion tracking will be integrated in the next generation of hardware from both Sony and Microsoft.