Peter Molyneux Has Some Issues With Kinect

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Microsoft may have made their motion control peripheral stand out from the pack by doing away with buttons completely, but being unique may not be such a good thing in this case. As it turns out, this whole “your body is the controller” feature is actually giving some developers a hard time. Take Peter Molyneux for instance, who’s in the middle of developing a Kinect-exclusive title called Fable: The Journey and has found that the device “has got some problems.”

“I’ll admit that Kinect has got some problems,” he said in an interview with Gaming Union. “As an input device it has some real problems. Without a thumb stick, navigation is a real problem. You haven’t got any buttons, so ordering the player to do something can be somewhat of a problem. But 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.”

Navigation right now seems to be Molyneux’s biggest issue with Fable: The Journey. Like he said, with no joysticks or buttons, getting players to be able to walk around freely seems to be the tricky thing about developing for Kinect, and it led many to believe that Fable: The Journey is something of an on-rails shooter after it was revealed at E3.

“It’s not on-rails!” Molyneux reiterated. “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.”

Whether it’s on-rails or not (and regardless of what his definition of “on-rails” actually is) it sounds like Molyneux and his team have worked through their issues with Kinect, explaining the process that took place after Microsoft asked them to do a core game for Kinect. “We sat down and thought through the problems with that, 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.”

Yep, Peter has always been one to talk big about Lionhead’s games, and it’s no different with Fable: The Journey. We’ll see if Lionhead can deliver on such lofty aspirations when Fable: The Journey is released next year.