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Good news for those of you worried about the possibility of seeing Avatars running around in future versions of games like Call of Duty – Microsoft’s admitted that the upcoming NXE feature “doesn’t lend itself” to some hardcore titles.
Avatars are Microsoft’s answer to Nintendo’s Miis. Gamers will be required to create one on November 19 when the New Xbox Experience console update launches, and it will be used as the virtual representation of your gaming self on Xbox LIVE.
At launch “about five or six” titles will include Avatar support and actually incorporate them into the gameplay, including Scene It? Box Office Smash and Uno Rush. Quiz show game 1 vs. 100, planned for release next spring, will also incorporate your Avatar into the gameplay.
Robin Burrowes, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) product manager for Xbox LIVE, told VideoGamer.com at a recent hands-on preview event for NXE that game developers and publishers will be “encouraged” to incorporate Avatars into gameplay, rather than it being mandatory as it is with Achievements.
He said: “It will be an encouragement point of view and we will show best practice with some Arcade games and some first party games. Scene It? right now is probably the best practice that we’ve got from a first party point of view. From an Arcade point of view games like Uno Rush, which will probably be the hero title for how Avartars merge with games. We’ll certainly be giving publishers the publishing rights to be able to merge those in.
“And in certain instances we’re going back to games we’ve already published like (Hardwood) Hearts and (Hardwood) Spades and retrofitting those with Avatar support. So there will be about five or six Avatar supported games both full release and Arcade that will happen at launch and then we’re looking at ramping that up to certainly a few dozen Avatar related games by spring time.”
For some hardcore titles, however, “it doesn’t lend itself” Burrowes said. “But there are the more fun, the more social expression type games that do absolutely lend themselves to that.”
Look out for a hands-on preview of NXE later today.
