It’s been too short a time for studios to get to full grips with Kinect’s tech, but by ”E3 next year” Sega predict teams will be using it much more.
”The dev kits we’ve had to work on have been exponentially improving over the period we’ve had them. The amount you can do out of the blocks is actually made pretty tricky,” Hayes told CVG, whilst saying they’ve got a team on a ‘hardcore’ title for Kinect.
”My guess is when we’re at E3 next year, more of the features of Kinect will be in use by developers. I think you’ll find more clever and sophisticated applications then. It is a reasonably complicated piece of kit, therefore it’s going to take us longer to use all of those aspects in a game.” We have to stay patient as this is new ground.
”We’re not going to be able to develop something in under a year, which is frankly what we’ve had,” noted the Sega West boss, referring to a hardcore game experience.
”Move is probably slightly different because we’ve been involved with that kind of motion control with Wii and to be honest what we did with EyeToy etc. before, so it’s probably easier for Sony to show and deliver more right now.”
Sega has a studio in England crunching ideas for Kinect’s brand of motion control technology, made up of their former Sega Racing Studio. ”We’ve got a tech group based in England, in Southall,” he said - that’s in Middlesex.
”We took them from the Racing Studio when we closed that as it was actually a very good team - we just couldn’t find something for them to do. They’re sat with their test tubes and bunsen burners and that’s exactly what they’re doing - using the new devices to see what we can do in an original way.”
”We’ve got one good idea and hopefully something will be out the back end of next year, perhaps early 2012, which we think will use the aspects of Kinect a lot more originally and in a more sophisticated way.” There you go, 1 Sega hardcore Kinect game in 2012.
Are you glad Microsoft took a gamble with something like the controller-less Kinect, or would you have preferred for them to imitate like Sony has with the Nintendo Wii?