Microsoft is hoping it’s Kinect peripheral, will make a huge splash with gamers. With no controller required, Kinect could be a fantastic way to get your friends and family in front of the TV. But what about playing with them? If there’s one thing we learned from the Wii, it’s that social gaming isn’t dead – playing with a friend is better than gaming alone.
Despite a lot of confusion about the amount of players Kinect can handle, we not know that Kinect can support for 3 or more players. In fact, one title is already doing it.
Previously, we reported that Kinect might only be able to handle two simultaneous players at once. Now, according to Kudo Tsunoda, Microsoft Xbox General Manager and Kinect Creative Director, we now know it’s up to developers to incorporate more players.
Speaking with Videogamer, Kudo had this to say in response to Kinect and it’s multiplayer capabilities:
“I think that it all depends on the kind of experience that you want to build. Certainly if you look at a game, go down on the floor, Dance Central is already incorporating a lot more than two players. So you know it’s not necessarily any kind of limitation as much as it is developers just trying to customise the experiences around what they think is the best way to play.You can see like sometimes in a split-screen game it’s hard to add more and more players because it’s hard to see what’s going on – and that’s true of any game. I think something like Dance Central you can see is already incorporating more than two.”
Of the 15 launch titles, Dance Central looks the most promising. Developed by Harmonix, Dance Central teaches you how to (yep, you guessed it) dance using authentic choreography and full body moves.
With strong impressions already under its belt, Dance Central looks to be the go-to game on Kinect for playing with your family and friends – when it drops this holiday season. However, Dance Central can only track one player on screen at a time. Given Tsunoda’s dodgy reply, one has to wonder if a team working on a project for Kinect has discovered a way to track more than 2 gamer’s movements at once. Or was Kudo simply alluding to a group of gamers taking turns in front of the motion enabled device like in Dance Central?
What about you, Ranters? Are the multiplayer capabilities of Kinect a deal-breaker for you? Which Kinect launch title are you most looking forward to? State your piece in the comments below.
Kinect launches with Dance Central November 4th, 2010 in North America and November 11th, 2010 in Europe.
Source: Videogamer
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My most anticipated game was whatever they were going to do with Milo. And then they took it away from us.
In other words, programming for more than two characters is extremely resource intensive. You could certainly have three or 4 players, but it’d have to be freaking Pong.
Dance Central indeed has more than two people incorporated into it. He just forgot to mention how it only actually tracks two people, and anyone else is just there to blend in
Dance Central actually only tracks one at a time…. the battle mode has the players take turns, but cannot track both on screen simultaneously.
I can see what he means though, since Rock Band is technically only a 1-4 player game, I would describe it as a “party” game, not limited to only those who are playing at a specific moment. If he’s trying to use that as an example of masking the limits of the system, then nice try.
3 or 4 players…how about Beer Pong? Boom.