More novel control schemes: Skyrim Kinect

I’ve been thinking about getting a Kinect for PC, considering how hackable they are, and how there’s an open-source stack useable cross-platform, and how Microsoft actually failed to fire the footgun recently by backing down on a lawsuit they were trying to initiate against someone who adapted a legally-owned Kinect to build said open-source stack.

That’s right — I’m thinking of rewarding Microsoft for not fucking up. If my antipathy for their business practices is genuine, I figure I should positively reinforce them when they do it right. Not that they as an entity have shown any capability for learning lessons outside of what matters to the bottom line, but maybe they’ll take away the thought that if you do right by the consumers of your product, they’ll do right by you.

Anyway, one of the more promising ideas with regard to the Kinect and the gaming world is adapting the control scheme for existing games. Like, say, Skyrim on the PC.

While the voice commands would get repetitive to an observer in a hurry (this short video already got me annoyed that he had to say “glass shield” instead of just “shield”), you have to admit that switching between spells and favorites by voice would take a lot of the tedium out of the Favorites system. Also, doing Shouts by actually shouting is kind of cool. A shame that it’s got such lag between your commands and it actually interpreting them.

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More novel control schemes: Skyrim Kinect
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5 thoughts on “More novel control schemes: Skyrim Kinect

  1. 1

    While I am still pleasantly surprised of the support (or at least, lack of antagonizing) Microsoft has been giving to people hacking the kinect, all I have to say about these motion control and various alternatives is ‘no thank you’.

    I’m just not that moved (pun not intended) or impressed by it. My parents have a Wii, and I’ve played some games on it. It was a novelty for about an hour, and then I started looking for settings to enable more traditional control schemes.

    Notify me when full-immersion holographics takes off (not a fan of Star Trek, but the holodeck comes to mind).

  2. 2

    I quit Skyrim because of a crappy broken mission, but being able to use voice to switch between the favorites (which was one of the most annoying things, specially since the hot-keys kept dissapearing) looked cool (although I played a stealth character, so maybe itd be like a Bard using his music to boost a sneak check in DnD and just not make sense lol).

    Motion controls on the whole though are annoying, I think. Which is why I haven’t got the new Zelda, even though its supposed to be a decent implementation of it.

  3. 4

    I suspect that’s a game-by-game thing, Kitty. I’ve seen a tech demo involving playing a virtual cello where the cellist was definitely seated. Which means, they need to build alternate control schemes for paraplegics.

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