14 DAY TRIAL // By now, everyone knows that Factor 5 didn't do such a great job with the former highly anticipated and promising dragon-flight title, Lair for the PS3. As it turns out, the development team encountered many problems during the game's development, but the project failed mostly because of the game's control scheme. Why? Ken Levine (BioShock lead designer) has stepped forward to defend Factor 5, creators of the PS3 exclusive dragon game.
"Let me speak in these guys' defense for a minute as a game developer," said Ken according to wired.com. "I'm sure somebody came to them at some point and said, 'We have this motion control controller, and we have to make a go of it. And we really think you should try to make your game exclusively on that.'"
Sure enough, that scenario could have easily happened and taking all the mishaps during development into consideration we can all understands why Factor 5 failed to deliver the next-gen title everyone was hoping for.
But the BioShock designer made another, very interesting and accurate observation (one I've been dying to see coming from a developer's/game designer's mouth - that the motion sensitive technology (referring to all motion sensitive controllers out there) doesn't bring many improvements to the gameplay experience. He even goes on giving another scenario as an example: "Aren't there a lot of games where you're just like, 'Dude, can I just use the d-pad or the analog stick?'"
And isn't he right? Whatever the game asks you to do, a motion sensitive controller will not send a 100 percent accurate signal, or at least the one you, as a hardcore gamer, are convinced is accurate. The reality is, this technology still has a bit more evolving to do, if it's going to be implemented in fancy games such as Lair and not just Wii Sports and Sonic.
But who/what exactly is Levine defending here, Factor 5 or Lair's controls?