With Microsoft waving the Kinect flag from every rafter of the recent E3 games show in Los Angeles, one of the most surprising announcements to come out of the conference was that Mass Effect 3 would feature support for Kinect. An epic, story driven space opera, that tasks the player with life or death decisions, a huge, branching storyline, and moral judgments at almost every corner, Mass Effect 3 was already an exciting prospect - but the inclusion of Kinect seemed a bit odd. As a game that's built around talking to other people, and making the right choices from the options the game gives you, in an effort to either resolve situations, or glean as much information as possible, in Mass Effect 3, rather than using Kinect in combat, or to navigate menus, Microsoft's sensor will instead give you the option of reading out lines, to select which way you want the conversation to go.
The team - with your voice.
When Eurogamer posed the question to EA's Frank Gibeau about why Mass Effect 3 decided to include Kinect support, he responded, "[To] grow the audience and make it more accessible,"
"Mass Effect has a fairly complicated combat system. You've got story and choice. For some fans that don't buy 12 games a year and maybe buy two or three, some of those things can be intimidating. We wanted to open up the accessibility without hurting the depth or the quality. Kinect is a fantastic technology that allows us to do that."
Which, to us, seems a slightly strange thing to say. Having so much choice at your fingertips isn't all that overwhelming when playing Mass Effect, but, more than that, we can't see how being able to read lines with your voice is going to make it any more accessible than moving a cursor to select an option. It doesn't reduce the level of choice, or even really make it any more intuitive, so the reasoning, to us, seems a tad on the off side.
But what do you think? Were you interested in Mass Effect 3 before? Have you become more interested since hearing about the game's support for Kinect? Let us know on our Facebook page.
