Sunday Thoughts: Motion Limits

So it’s been suggested I do something Christmassy today, given we’re now within a week of the big day. That is pretty tempting, but given me and a few other writers have been putting some effort into making sure you have some content to read over the Christmas period I’m a little bit tired of Christmas stuff. So instead today we’ll talk about something that has very little to do with Christmas – where motion controls should be used.

Lets get the obvious out of the way first, motion controls are not appropriate in every single title ever. There are of course the games that started to crop up a lot more this generation where the controls are obviously appropriate, titles like Wii Sports or Sports Champion. These kind of titles have, for the most part, been vastly improved this generation and become a hit with a whole new segment of the market. Even many who consider themselves ‘hardcore’ gamers can enjoy these sort of titles, and they’re certainly improved for having the motion control in there. I don’t really want to be perfectly charging a bar by holding X down, it really is a lot more satisfying to move the controller like you’re actually throwing a Frisbee.

The real question is do we want them in games that don’t have an obvious place for motion control, or have been built from the ground up to take advantage of motion control (like Flower). We’ve always had light gun games (the Magnavox Galaxy, the first home console, had one), but I’ve never thought “You know what? I wish SOCOM/Killzone/Random FPS played like this!” There’s never been a point where I wanted the experience from Time Crisis in more ‘traditional’ shooters.

Of course Move and even the Wii give us much greater fidelity than a light gun does, but the basic mechanic is still pretty much the same. You’re still pointing to shoot, the only difference is you’re less on rails when the mechanic is taken into a fully fledged FPS. Initially that made me pretty wary of the concept, but our very own Alex says that it works pretty well in Killzone 3 so perhaps it’s not all that bad.

There is of course the Kinect issue to be considered. With it’s different take on motion control it’s had a lot written about it, something that Microsoft are probably revelling in. There are a lot of possibilities for the camera, and I don’t think we’ve come close to seeing what it’s capable of in the long run. The open-source community is already showing us new possibilities for the hardware, and that’s just in terms of UI design. Given time I think we’ll see some new gameplay mechanics for this hardware, much as we did with flOw and Flower’s utilization of the sensors in the SixAxis controller.

What I don’t think we’ll see, at least not for a while yet, is more games in the vein of Joy Ride. The control scheme, frankly, isn’t very good, it’s not comfortable for any prolonged period of time and it really shows exactly where not to go with Kinect. Whilst I’m a Kinect advocate based on my own experiences (and may well own one soon), Joy Ride is just not the way to go with the system.

As for moving Kinect into more ‘hardcore’ games, I don’t know what we’ll see. Maybe Gears of War 3 or the next Halo will include it in some kind of augmentation role, adding a new dimension to the game. I don’t think we’ll see it used as the primary control scheme in a shooter for a while, but it’s not really designed for that in the same way that the Wii or Move aren’t really designed to do fitness games. Sure people have found ways to do it, but it does seem that the detection in Your Shape is already better than titles on the other systems even if it is lacking in other areas.

The main thing to keep in mind is that, in many ways, we’re just at the beginning of seeing where all of this is going. Maybe in ten years we’ll be playing all of our games motion controlled, or maybe we’ll understand where it works and where it doesn’t more fully. I don’t think it’ll ever go away though, at the very least we’ll always see more sports and party titles.