Project Natal ALL OVER UK NEWS!

[NJ5]

rover said:

NJ5 said:

I didn't express myself well. I'm sure the technology is solid, and it can actually detect your body movements with reasonable accuracy (it certainly looked that way at the E3 demo, and the article you linked to supports that).

What I have doubts about is whether this is a good idea for practical game development. For example, you have to set up your room so that this camera can see your whole body. Apparently "Burnout Natal" needs that for acceleration. It's already a bit of a pain to move things around the room to play Wii Fit, but it's acceptable being an exercise game. But I certainly don't want to do that every time I play a game.

The other problem has already been repeated a lot of times, the lack of any buttons/analog sticks/triggers for movement control and other actions. Sure, developers will get creative and solve some of these problems, but there are going to be limits I think.

I certainly don't want to come off as bashing MS for this, especially since I had previously thought I'd be one of the first to buy a motion controller from MS. My instinct just tells me this is not going to work out that well.

 

Though I'm sure it's been stated a number of times already, Natal would be an additional control scheme rather than an outright replacement of the controller.

Some games will never lend themselves to full-body tracking and I'd be shocked if (m)any core games actually tried to fully replace the controller with this.  The required buttons and options *seem* to preclude this. 

But, there are tons of games which would benefit from full-body tracking.  DDR comes to mind, as does Kart racing.  Also there'll probably be lots of small 'fun' things which use this, like playing catch with a friend on LIVE... stuff like that which can make the entire experience of using the console more accessible. 

 

Agreed, that has actually been my whole point, that this system isn't versatile enough as it stands. If they had shown us a few ways to add traditional controls on top of this, I think people would have been much more convinced.

One of the things it could be used for is perhaps head tracking. That's something they could incorporate together with traditional controls, and might be applicable to some genres. It's all very uncertain for now...