Molyneux: Move not as big a step as Natal

Peter Molyneux, the creative director of Microsoft Game Studios, has stated that as much as he’d love a chance to play with Sony’s recently revealed PlayStation Move, he doesn’t believe the tech is as evolutionary as his company’s Xbox 360 Natal.

At E3 last year we saw they were having a wand, and that’s kind of what I expected,” he told Eurogamer. It looks like they’ve taken a step forward but it’s not as big a step as something like Natal, I don’t think.

This is purely me talking personally, but I think maybe it’s slightly more a device for the core than it is for the casual market, because I think it’s quite precise.

As a designer it’s another one of those things I’d love to get my hands on and to play around with. As a consumer, everyone’s talking about motion control now. It’s kind of like the arms race, with the Wii MotionPlus and now the Sony Move and now I’m getting kind of confused.”

Molyneux added that he believes that the focus shift toward motion controls is causing ripples amongst the development community.

It’s all down to what us poor old designers do with this stuff, because all these guys do is make the hardware,” he added. Whether we utilise that hardware in a real way or whether we just take shortcuts, that’s really going to be where we succeed or not.

All of this stuff is making all the designers sweat. I’ve met lots of designers at GDC and we’re all very bleary eyed at the moment because every rule we’ve got, we’re having to throw away. We haven’t got buttons any more – we’ve got motions and arms legs and faces, and that really is tough.”