14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Rare says that its upcoming Kinect: Sports Rivals once included game modes centered around fishing and horse riding, but they were eliminated during the prototype stage for the title.
Danny Isaac, a producer working at the studio, is quoted by VG247 as saying that, “Yeah, there were some that didn’t make it. Some we cut completely – we had horse racing and fishing, which we built as prototypes. All the sports that made it into the product were all built as prototypes before.”
The team chose those sports, which included a lot of player input, because they wanted to use as much of the new features of the Kinect motion tracking sensor as possible.
The prototypes that Rare created also included table tennis, a Frisbee-based experience and kayaking, but all were abandoned because they failed to be constantly engaging.
The developer adds, “When we go for our preproduction stage and our concept stage, we tend to go very broad and very wide. At the time though the sensor wasn’t complete, so we were prototyping on the old Kinect, as well as trying to mimic the fidelity that we’d have on the actual sensor. That’s when we proofed out things like rock-climbing, with the open and closed hands, and wake-racing, soccer, target shooting and tennis.”
At the moment, Rare and Microsoft are offering players a chance to take a look at Kinect Sports Rivals via the Preseason demo version that can be download from the web store of the Xbox One.
The full game is at the moment expected to be available on the home console in spring 2014, after it was delayed in order to give developers more time to polish the experience.
Rare has also suggested that it might deliver more sports as DLC during the coming year.