With Kinect, Microsoft have offered an entirely different way for people to play games. Going far and beyond the Wii's motion controller, Kinect lets you play games without having anything in your hands at all. Tracking your body in order to let you play games, Kinect presents not only a challenge to those with small living rooms, but to the games industry as well. How do you develop a game for a controller that, well, isn't one. What happens when you move beyond Wii Sports style mini games? Peter Molyneux, the head of developer Lionhead, who are responsible for upcoming Kinect role playing game Fable: The Journey has offered his opinions on the challenges Kinect poses.
In an interview with Gaming Union, Molyneux said "I'll admit that Kinect has got some problems. As an input device it has some real problems."
Fable: The Journey seems to solve the navigation problem by having you move from place to place by horse, while combat sees you making gestures with your hands to cast spells.
"Without a thumb stick, navigation is a real problem. 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"
The things Molyneux touches on are issues developers are only just starting to get their heads around. How do you control a character, and make them move throughout a world, without a stick, or control pad to move them? How do you ask a player to push a button, if there are none to push? It's a paradigm shift, and one it looks like developers are going to take a while to get the hang of.
