14 DAY TRIAL // Motion control is coming into its own in a big way. The Nintendo Wii has had it for some time but a lot of people dismissed it as just a gimmick to bring in more casual players but now the Xbox 360 is getting Project Natal set to arrive at some point in 2010, while the PlayStation 3 is getting the motion tracking wand set for spring 2010.
This means that those who are creating next year’s blockbusters need to think about implementing motion control support in their games. And one of the biggest releases of 2010 is BioShock 2, which should arrive on February 9, well ahead of the wand and Natal.
When asked by Eurogamer in an interview about how the Sony wand could influence BioShock, Jordan Thomas, the creative director at 2K Marin, stated, “I can't talk about ‘secretly beavering away’ on anything, but I will say this: with a game like BioShock, this is an immersive simulation, I come from that old nerdy school where the original shooter-meeting-RPG-action was spun together, and I love to see more people able to play that kind of game; to make those kind of choices. And if in the future these interface revolutions, let's say, give us the ability to allow maybe even non-gamers to enjoy that sense of freedom, I'm all for it.”
So, BioShock 2 is probably too near to the end point of development to get any support for Project Natal and for the wand and a future patch would probably be too costly to implement. But with the series getting so much attention from fans and with the second title shaping up to be even more successful than the first one, BioShock 3 will probably be ready to be controlled only through motion.