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One of the industry’s most treasured creative forces has admitted the Kinect control system “has got some real problems”.
Peter Molyneux, who is one of the Microsoft’s top game executives in the UK, broke company-wide policy and spoke candidly about the popular – though often derided – Xbox peripheral.
“I’ll admit that Kinect has got some problems,” he told GamingUnion.
“As an input device it has some real problems,” he said.
It appears Molyneux was criticising the device from the perspective of a games designer.
“Without a thumb stick, navigation is a real problem [on Kinect],” he said.
“You haven’t got any buttons, so ordering the player to do something can be somewhat of a problem. But what Kinect does have is a great sense of freedom and emotion. So that’s what we’ve tried to do with Fable The Journey.”
Fable The Journey will be Lionhead’s first Kinect-focused project that makes it to market.
The company’s ambitious debut project, called Milo, was cancelled for reasons that have not been disclosed.
It appears, even after Milo, Microsoft was still keen on Lionhead building a Kinect only title.
“Microsoft said to us, ‘look we want you to do a [Kinect] experience for the core gamers’, so we sat down and thought through the problems with that,” Molyneux said.
“The first thing was figuring out how we can make Kinect more engaging, more engrossing, and more emotional than any control-based game or any Fable game has ever been before.”
