Nobody has yet made what you would consider a “core” game for Kinect, and while we’re still in the very early stages of the peripheral’s life, you might wonder if it’s even doable (for certain genres, at least). In the case of Fight Night Champion, EA Sports’ upcoming simulation boxing title, EA Canada gameplay producer Brian Hayes explained last August that the studio would not be shoehorning motion controls into the game, since “standing on your feet for three minutes and throwing punches is something that, believe it or not, might be beyond the fitness level of most gamers!”
In the interim, we’ve seen the release of both Move and Kinect, and EA Canada is trying to figure out how a motion-controlled boxing sim would work. Producer Mike Mahar, in an interview with Eurogamer, asserted that the developer would “undeniably” integrate motion controls into the Fight Night franchise at some point, although it remains unclear if they would be implemented in a mini-game within the next Fight Night title or in a separate game:
We’ve done some pretty cool prototyping. It could perhaps be a mini-game embedded in. Then again, with how precise and how robust the movement and motion controls are now, I think we’d be doing them a disservice if we simply said that our version of a motion control game is a mini-game within Fight Night.
“Right now, the best simulation experience we can give users is through a conventional controller,” Mahar noted, and indeed, a realistic boxing sim with motion controls seems difficult to pull off. “If you’re going to make a full fighting game, it might be a different experience than a Fight Night or an MMA,” which is the way Mahar would prefer to go: “I think we’d best serve the community, if we’re going to do anything ever, with a totally different game.”
What about you? If you were going to play a Kinect-enabled boxing sim, would you want it to be its own game, or a mini-game within a larger Fight Night title?
EA prototyping Fight Night Kinect [Eurogamer]
