14 DAY TRIAL // The development team working on Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor at Capcom believes that it will be the best game to use the Kinect motion-tracking system for the Xbox 360, mainly because of the way Microsoft has updated the gesture recognition in order to accommodate the needs of the team.
Kenjo Katoka, who is a producer working on Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor at From Software, told Eurogamer that, “Initially, when we started testing Steel Battalion on Kinect, the movement recognition was done by area. It detected where your hands are, and that’s how the program tried to see what you were trying to do.”
But the tracking was not good enough to capture the small movements that were required to make sure that players were able to direct the movement of their vehicles during the various missions.
Kataoka added, “So Microsoft developed another whole set of technology that meant it recognized actual gestures, not the absolute area. Now it’s a combination of coordinates, area and gestures. That adds a lot more accuracy.”
The developer says that the development team at Capcom worked very close with Microsoft in order to make sure that the Kinect technology was able to deliver what Steel Battalion required.
In order to give gamers as many options as possible, the developers from From Software did extensive checking on the possibilities of Kinect and made sure that it was easy to use it to control their mechs and that they would never lose fights or time because of problems with the motion tracking.
Kinect has so far attracted mostly simple experiences aimed at kids and Steel Battalion will be one of the few hardware titles to use the technology.
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor will only be launched on the Xbox 360 home console and will arrive on June 19 in North America and three days later in Europe.