14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Rare might only be including six activities in its upcoming Kinect Sports Rivals on launch, but the company says that it will be adding more after launch and that the final number might rise into the double digits.
Danny Isaac, who works as an executive producer on the title, tells CVG that, during the development process, about 30 different sports were in the prototype stage, which means that Rare has a good handle on how it can use Kinect to simulate them.
Apparently, horse riding and fishing are the activities that are farthest away from the elements included in Kinect Sports Rivals at launch: wake racing, climbing, football, target shooting, bowling and tennis.
The developer explains, “we built all of these prototypes and then built this big graph and rated each sport. Not just for fun, but also appeal for different ages, whether it showed off the sensor well and also telemetry from the previous Kinect Sports instalments and what people liked.”
The company then used feedback coming from the testers and their own evaluations to choose which final six activities were included in Kinect Sports Rivals.
Rare and Microsoft are currently not ready to talk about their plans for downloadable content for the title, but expect to find out more right before launch, with a Season Pass one of the possible options.
Isaac adds, “We have a number of scenarios for how it might play out. For now though we think we have a very robust offering in the short-term. We still have some unfinished business, but if we could all get in what we wanted the game would be two or three times the size it is.”
Kinect Sports Rivals will be delivered on April 8 in North America and three days later in Europe, exclusively on the Xbox One.
It was initially supposed to be a launch title for the next-gen platform from Microsoft, but a delay was announced in order to give Rare more time and resources to improve the quality of the experience.
The studio has recently said that it feels that the Kinect motion-tracking system that’s included in the Xbox One is underappreciated by core gamers, who do not have any titles to use it with.
The functionality that it adds can be expanded as the console matures.
Rumors suggest that an Xbox One without Kinect could be delivered at some point next year.