BioWare toyed with the idea of adding motion controls to Mass Effect 3, but eventually decided this would disrupt the experience, according to BioWare's general manager Aaryn Flynn.
Speaking to VentureBeat, Flynn also revealed that the new Mass Effect's Kinect voice commands took nine months to implement.
"It launched during the middle of the development of Mass Effect 3," he recalled. "After [Kinect] came out, I was playing Kinect with my kids. Microsoft reached out and asked what BioWare could do with Kinect.
"Mass Effect has squad mates. It has a system for conversations. And speaking in voice seemed to be the right thing to do. It worked with the brand. It all worked out."
BioWare's experimentations with gesture commands weren't as successful. "We looked into it," Flynn went on. "But unfortunately, it has a lot more technological requirements. We also weren't sure the gestures fit in with the authentic experience. The good news is voice worked out very well.
"The technology was a barrier there so we discounted it pretty early."
Kinect voice controls make for "more fluid and immersive" play, Flynn argued, as there's no need to bring up the command wheel. BioWare's extremely happy with Kinect's response times.
"The Kinect software is quite good and so it does pick up on what you're saying very quickly. Mass Effect 3 is a very responsive game, so it can respond quickly to that verbal command and turn it into a command that the game can execute."
Those who don't own Kinect won't find the game cumbersome, however. "I'm not sure you end up playing faster or slower - it's more about what suits the player. There are those people who are very quick with their fingers and love to pause the game and go into the menus. They set up their commands.
"Then are those who are more focused as Shepard and want to be immersed in the action as they issue commands to their squads. It's another way to play it."
Look out for more on Mass Effect 3 in our next issue, out 25th January. A Mass Effect 3 demo will hit Xbox Live on 14th February, comprising single and multiplayer content. Owners of Battlefield 3's Limited Edition will get first access to the latter.
8 comments so far...
bamozzy on 19 Jan '12 said:
I am glad they dropped the idea of motion controls as I really cannot see that working as well as a controller would but I am quite excited by the Voice commands. I may download the demo - purely for the multi-player - I think I will wait for the game to be released before jumping into the single player - If I can resist it on the demo that is!!
SidTheSloth on 19 Jan '12 said:
Also think it would have detracted from the game...
...Head is spinning from all the mass effect/kinect related threads!!!
T-meredith on 19 Jan '12 said:
That sucks i dont have kinect, will the voice commands work through headsets too? please say yes!
SidTheSloth on 19 Jan '12 said:
See, the problem with multiple threads - both this question and answer is in one of the others (not a dig at you, pointing out to the forum powers that be!!)!
I'm afraid it would seem the answer is no - which is ridiculous on one hand, but how would they sell kinects if you could? Presumably you've played the earlier games though, were they shit because you couldn't voice control? Nope, so don't worry too much, save your money towards the next xbox, keep ME3 and then you can try it on that (making the huge assumption it'll be backwards compatible!)
Decent_Jam on 19 Jan '12 said:
Well that's the Kinect for ME3 argument out of the window then, not even close to worth it for such 'lite' style implementation.
Shame really because it could have been really good if done well, just little optional touches, but no, another mark against Kinect for the 'hardcore'.
sonicmark on 23 Jan '12 said:
I have to laugh really because I just bought a Kinect yesterday, partly because of the possiblity of Kinect based ME3 achievements (and partly because the girlfriend said I could do what the f**k I like hehe), I still wonder if there'll be some voice command based achievements like "Speak for yourself" or "Fast Talker" (I could go on all day with these witty achievements).
pauloselhombre on 2 Feb '12 said:
Not meaning to start a fight here, but it's not ridiculous at all. Speech recognition software is extremely complex, and the processing overheads are significant. Kinect has both the hardware and software for sophisticated voice recognition built it. If it weren't for Kinect, it just wouldn't be feasible to use voice recognition in a game in any real functional manner - the developers would have to write the speech recognition software and dedicate a significant chunk of the console's processing power to it, whether that falls on the CPU, the sound chip, etc. I'm sure I don't need to point out how much the rest of the game would suffer as a result.
With Kinect, it's pretty much a matter of coding the game to ask for input from Kinect and then act on it. Of course that's a simplification, but now imagine how much work it would be without Kinect.
SidTheSloth on 2 Feb '12 said:
It's ok, you're allowed to have an opinion without it resulting in a fight - the 'ridiculous' comment was aimed more at the fact a headset has a microphone so surely it goes hand in hand with voice commands!
Are you aware however that the kinect does not have its own processor and so actually does rely on the 360's own xenon? It was originally planned that it would have a dedicated cpu but it was cut from the final device for many rumoured reasons with the most likely being cost, but data transfer speeds also potentially another?!
A teardown by a tech website found something akin to a processor but without boring the pants off you and me, it wasn't, so whilst i agree with your points about complexity of vrs, the hardware trade off you mention is somewhat flawed?
Alex Kipman was the MS guy responsible etc and in his interviews he said it'd be 10-15% of the xbox's processing power utilised by kinect, but he changed that figure later to something lower.