More details on Mass Effect 3's Kinect usage

[Hapimeses]

Rainbird said:

Hapimeses said:

Rainbird said:

2) No one has been complaining spotty voice recognition from the languages Microsoft support at the moment. We'll see if that changes when they launch the next batch of supported languages.

3) Less easy or effective? It looks way faster than going through a bunch of menus for giving your squad commands, not to mention hellishly more immersive. The storytelling aspect might not be easier or faster, but it has potential to be much more immersive I think. And it's not like you need good response time for that...

I'm going to call you out on these. I think your enthusiam for the tech is perhaps blinding you to some obvious flaws.

2) The Kinect often fails to get one of my voice commands correct. It is not 100% accurate at all. Certainly nowhere near as accurate as pressing A.

3) It will be very much slower. Let me explain why it is in two important ways:

Assume the order I want to give is for Tali to arm a Shotgun. This is as simple an order as I can imagine. Choices for this are:

i) Say 'Tali: Shotgun'.

ii) Press LB and select the Shotgun.

The first option, i), not only takes longer in practice, as it takes more time to utter the words clearly than it does to select the shotgun (which takes a fraction of a second once practiced), but it also takes far, far longer in-game. During play, option i) takes a second or two, during which time you wil be shot, or the state of the battlefield may even have changed; option ii), by comparison, is instantaneous, as the game pauses while the order is sent.

In short, voice commands are always slower. More immersive, probably, but much slower, and also considerably less accurate. And I don't just mean in terms of recognising quickly uttered phrases (which it will not always do as I mentioned in 2 above, especially as voices will frequently be excited), but I mean for accurately targetting bad guys as I mentioned in my previous post.

That all said, perhaps it will work in a way I simply don't expect. However, having played many games with voice recognition, both good and bad, I kinda doubt it.

2) Voice commands aren't supported where I live, so I go by what seems to be happening on the forums, and I haven't seen a single person complain. If that's not the way it is, then fair enough, I haven't exactly done any deep investigation here.

3) I guess it depends on play style. I've never been using my squad in detail enough to change a characters weapon, in combat more than maybe five times throughout any of the games. I've never gotten to the point where I know the placements of the different abilities in the menus by heart either, so for me, voice commands seem like more fun in that they add immersion (hopefully), while giving me a less cluttered experience.

If you're playing on a higher difficulty then I agree it's probably not good enough, but for me, that's not going to be an issue.

2) Really? That also sucks. In short: it doesn't always work very well. Sometimes I have to command the device a couple of times or more to get it to do what I want, especially if there are people talking at the same time. It usually works, but not reliably. It's unreliable enough that I pretty much never use the function in practice. As I mentioned before, buttons are quicker and more accurate. After the 'oooooh, new toy' phase passes, it's just a slower, less-accurate way of accessing your console's functions (which is also true for navigating using Kinect's motion sensing; in fact, this is significantly slower, and significantly less accurate).

3) I, by comparison, always use my squad, and always use my powers, so soon they were second nature to me. So, perhaps you're correct, for casual gamers it will be more useful. Run and gunners and the like. I've also completed both games on Insanity with both Paragon and Renegade playthroughs, so I'm very used to the LB/RB dials (or L1/L2 dials, or space bar on PC -- I've played them all).

However, as I said in my previous post, I'm not really bothered by the integration for all I think it won't work well, I'm bothered by how it's been limited to Kinect only, which is a slap in the face to many loyal ME fans, all of whom have mics on 360, mics that could do the job just as well.