Malstrom: Microsoft has lost control of the NATAL hype

[HappySqurriel]

WereKitten said:

^Still, there's no evidence that Wii developers acquired any valuable know-how on motion control, up to this point in time. Gestures hardly have any depth that game designers must fathom.

Still, I can't see all the difference between WM+ and wands or Natal controls. Developers will have to choose on how much they want to go all out on complex motion controls, and how that reflects on traditional control schemes for the same game. That will be true for the next Zelda as much as it could be true for GTA5 if Sony decided to offer some money and developers to implement extra motion control based features.

Yes, some devs will have about 12 months of a head start with WM+ (the devkits by Sony and MS are out there yet), but the exact hardware used is almost immaterial. Once EA codes WM+ controls into one of their games, porting it to Sony wands will be trivial. The design part when it comes to integrating that kind of controls into gameplay is what is hard, and that is the same for any console.

That's the point ... deciding when and where to use motion controls has been a consideration for 4 years for Nintendo developers, and higher detailed MotionPlus controls for 2 to 3 years by the time Sony and Microsoft release their first game. To make matters worse, developers will not be able to design a tennis game (as an example) that targets a decent userbase for these new systems that actually allows a user to control the direction of the ball using the motion controlls; they will have to choose a potential large userbase or implement meaningful motion controlls. Nintendo doesn't have this problem.