Gaming Everything

“I mean, I would love to have finished the Milo thing. I did this thing called Milo, and there was a lot more to Milo than people saw. I’d have loved to have finished that project. You know, there was bits of it that really worked incredibly well that were emotional and really emotionally driven moments.”

“There was one bit where Milo was just sitting in this room and he’d just moved house and he was just so fragile and scared, it was such an endearing moment. And the world never saw that, and that was a real tragedy. It was just that Milo was not for the Xbox 360. It may have been better, funnily enough, to have existed on tablets. There’s an audience out there that would maybe appreciate that softer, less script-driven game. I feel sad that it was never finished, but I think it was sensible of [Microsoft] to stop it.”

- Game Designer Peter Molyneux

I was always vaguely interested in Milo, despite the fact that the project seemed noticeably too lofty for the generation it was attempting to exist on. Perhaps we can see a revival in the indie scene on the Xbox One with the new version of Kinect.

http://gamingeverything.com/molyneux-says-he-would-have-loved-to-have-finished-project-milo-the-kinect-tech-demo-from-2009/

I personally never saw the gaming appeal to Milo. The project felt like a sophisticated Tamagotchi. It was fine as a tech demo but I don't think there was potential for a full fledged game there.

Funding.

Milo never seemed to be more of a tech demo. Wasn't received too well (at least in Germany), too. Magazines called him "fabricated" and "annoying".

I thought the idea itself was pretty cool. An actual AI you could interact with, that would respond to any dialogue you threw at it. Sure it was relatively simple, but when I first saw it, my initial thoughts were "holy shit if you could integrate this idea into something like a future Mass Effect game, so you could have real conversations with the characters.......*drool*"

Too bad nothing has come of it so far

I don't quite follow his thinking. On one had he said it was/would have been great. And on the other supports Microsoft's decision to stop it.

Anyway, I remember first seeing Sim City and Tamagotchi and thinking there would be no appeal and they wouldn't be fun. And they were, they both give you a since of accomplishment.

I think the market for a virtual friend would be *HUGE!*

Milo is aimed at three to five year olds that don't buy Xboxes. Most parents won't buy a three to five hundred dollar Xbox to give to their three to five year old just to play Milo. I just don't see it taking off like they would of hope for , but I'm not the expert.

milo was the coolest kinect thing i've seen

It was.  Kinectimals actually had the same AI technology built into it.

My guess is that in the future, when developers realize how powerful Kinect 2's speech processing is that they'll begin integrating real conversations.  Though in all fairness, having experienced promptless gaming back in the age of text adventures, I like the way Mass Effect does it.  Having to guess what the best thing to say is and have it work for what you want to do, are two very different things.  I hated Zork for that reason.    Trying to guess what a developer is thinking isn't as easy as it sounds.

Listening to him talk abut it in the videos where he demonstrates it, it seems it would be a pedophiles dream to have that type of relationship with a child.  Listening to him I kept asking myself, "Why would any sane adult want to 'play' this?"