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Lionhead boss and celebrated games designer Peter Molyneux has admitted that Microsoft’s much-touted Kinect motion-sensing device creates certain issues with navigation.
“I’ll admit that Kinect has got some problems,” said the venerated developer in an interview with Gaming Union.
Molyneux announced Fable: The Journey as a Kinect-exclusive during Microsoft’s E3 2011 conference.
So, what does he think of it as an input device? “As an input device it has some real problems. Without a thumb stick, navigation is a real problem.”
What about the lack of buttons, Peter? “You haven’t got any buttons, so ordering the player to do something can be somewhat of a problem.”
But Molyneux knows that Kinect has an ace up its sleeve “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 has been criticised for having an on-rails E3 demo – a decision Molyneux later called a “horrendous mistake” – and Molyneux was once again keen to set the record straight and say that the full game will allow players to navigate by themselves.
“It’s not on-rails,” he said. “That is exactly the opposite of everything we’ve done so far with Fable. The press briefing and these demos have to be so tight that we didn’t have time to show how you navigate around. We just set the press briefing demo on-rails.”
How does navigation work in Fable: The Journey, then? “When you’re off your horse, you can move around freely. There’s two ways you can move around; either using body tracking to lean one way or the other, or you can actually gesture left and right. It just so happens that if you go too far away from your horse and carriage, bad things will happen.”
The idea for Fable: The Journey came about seven months ago when Microsoft approached Lionhead and asked for a core-specific Kinect title.
“So we sat down and thought through the problems with that,” said Molyneux, “and 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.”
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