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Microsoft Natal vs. the Sony Motion Controller
Date: 2009-06-12
Author: Vaga
Now that E3 has come and gone, and the gaming buzz is starting to settle back down to its usual levels, it's time to grab a cup of coffee and do some even-tempered analytical thinking about the show's biggest announcements: Microsoft's Natal and Sony's Motion Controller. (Just in case you spent the beginning of June under a rock, Microsoft and Sony both announced new game control technologies based on full body video capture.) What can these technologies really do? Who will they benefit? How will they change the face of gaming? What are the two companies really after? Let's take a closer look at these seemingly simple questions and see if we can't glean some truths that lay not on top, but rather below the surface.
What are we doing wrong?
Perhaps the best place to start is by asking the most simple question of all: "Why?" Here we have two major companies clearly making some major investments into new technologies - but what problem are they trying to solve? What will these next generation gizmos do that cannot be done today with existing control schemes? Let's take a look at them one by one.
If their E3 presentation is any indication, Microsoft is clearly positioning their Natal announcement as the future of gaming, with a strong focus on enabling new aspects of player-game interactions that were not theretofore available. The first of these is the obvious "control without the controller" feature. Yes, Natal certainly holds that promise. The more important question, however, is what is the real value of this feature, beyond the sheer "cool factor"? Is it solving an actual problem? Are people complaining about having to hold a controller in their hands while they enjoy their favorite games? Unless gamers I know are very unlike the rest of the world, not really. Therefore we can judge this particular capability to be a "nice to have" coat of paint at best.
The next feature is being able to control a game through full body motion, rather than through a set of buttons. This ability was most directly demonstrated by Microsoft's Ricochet demo, where a player utilized her entire body to play a game of human-sized, 3-dimensional Breakout. This is indeed new, although one can argue that Nintendo already provides a partial approximation of this ability with its simpler Wiimote technology. Natal can certainly do more than Wii's accelerometer on a technical level, but from a practical consumer perspective, the gap is much smaller. Although theoretically cool, full body motion is in fact not a very good, and certainly not a very broadly applicable way to control a game. First of all, it's rather slow - pressing a button to kick a ball is a hell of a lot faster than imitating a real kick with your foot. Second, it's tiring (the E3 demonstrator broke a sweat in just a few minutes), and not realistic for a large portion of the population who may not have the space, the physique, or simply the desire to turn an entertainment experience into heavy exercise. And thirdly, it simply doesn't work for many of the kinds of things that characters do in video games. Can you really imagine playing Prince of Persia, God of War, or even Madden with this type of scheme? With all these limitations, it's questionable whether this kind of control provides any practical benefit beyond the kinds of games already being played on the Wii, so Microsoft's technology might be largely overkill for this particular aspect of the job.
Let's keep looking. Microsoft's second demo was "Paint". Without going into much detail, it is abundantly clear that no one will ever want to use this particular application of Natal. Gamers will prefer to play games, and artists still have infinitely more professional (real-life) tools for doing serious work. "Paint" can therefore be dismissed a purely technical demonstration that has no further relevance on our discussion.
Next was Milo. Now here we finally hit something truly interesting. It's here that the value of Natal's voice recognition and real-time scanning capabilities becomes apparent, as they directly enable the kind of communication between the player and the character that wasn't previously possible. It can be argued that this (for the first time) allows true immersion of the player into the game without resorting to current 1st person perspective approaches and their obvious limitations. Note, however, that not as much here is really as breakthrough as Peter Molyneux would have you believe. The touted portion where Milo tosses a pair of goggles to the player and she intuitively extends her hands to catch them actually doesn't use any Natal capabilities at all! Think about that for a second - this is something that is completely doable within the confines of existing console technology. Of course the reverse process - one where the player draws a picture and "passes" it to Milo in real-time is the true Natal showcase, and this indeed has potential for increased player immersion.
Now let's look at Sony. Sony Playstation CEO Jack Tretton makes things easy for us by directly stating Sony's objective with the Motion Controller device: to open up Playstation games to more casual players. Hmm. Really? It seems then, that Sony is under the impression that it is the over-complicated controllers that keep the casual gamers away from their games. But is this really the case? After all, most people are rather used to small plastic things with buttons that control electronics from their TVs to their air conditioners. And arcade games are pretty accessible to the average casual gamer, yet those controls are not particularly less complicated than those of the PS3 controller. What makes arcades more accessible is actually the fact that the games themselves are a lot simpler - they are designed in a way where the objective and the method of achieving that objective become apparent to a lay person in 30 seconds or less. The controller has very little to do with it.
Surely, Sony understands this. So then, they are being a little coy. What they are really saying is that they would like to introduce some casual games, but are too embarrassed to do it without hiding behind a new device that supposedly enables those kinds of games. A device, which in essence is little more than a Playstation Wiimote (though one that actually fulfills the promises of precision, responsiveness, and accuracy). But let's not beat up on Sony too much - after all, they were first to this party with the original Eye Toy, and besides, a Wiimote that finally lives up to expectations is still a worthwhile accomplishment in and of itself. Since Jack Tretton chose to let us read between the lines, however, lets re-define Sony's Motion Controller goals a little more realistically:
1) Get in on that fat casual gamer revenue stream that Nintendo carved out for itself with the Wii.
2) By implementing a technologically better version of the Wiimote, extend Sony's reach into the game genres that the Wiimote tried to address, but couldn't due to its technical shortcomings.
That second point in particular bears some further elaboration. If you think back to the days before the launch of the Wii, you'll recall that the industry was pinning big hopes on the Wiimote revolutionizing the shooter genre. While the Wiimote proved far too unresponsive and inaccurate to be up to the task, Sony's Motion Controller may now be very well fit for the job. So Sony's second goal may be to attempt to make the PS3 a unique shooter platform (provided they can do it better and/or sooner than Microsoft).
Incidentally, the boys in Redmond are clearly as interested as Sony in achieving the two objectives above. The difference here is in the marketing scheme: unlike Sony, Microsoft chose to present their technology in a slightly different light, focusing more on the new possibilities for player immersion, not just on motion controls.
So it seems that after we plow through the hype, there are still a couple of points of real innovation coming forth from both Microsoft and Sony camps. But before we delve into the question of how these potential innovations might change the face of gaming, let's quickly answer another important question - are these new technologies supposed to completely displace the current game controllers?
The answer (and I hope you will agree) is a resounding "no", in both cases. As described earlier, the sheer idea of motion-based controls simply cannot be effectively applied to all the different kinds of games we play today (to say nothing of the games we might want to play tomorrow); nor does it fit the intentions and lifestyles of significant majority of today's players. This is why Microsoft was smart to stress the Peter Molyneux demo, which minimizes the importance of motion control and instead stresses the more subtle vision of player immersion achievable via the voice recognition, real-time scanning and object recognition aspects of Natal. With this important point established, let's look at what actual changes to the landscape of gaming might be forthcoming if Natal and the Motion Controller indeed take off.
What will this do to gaming?
So let's fast-forward a few years and assume that Natal and Motion Controller have matured, and have been embraced by the development community. What kind of games are we likely to be playing in such a future? And what will the gaming world look like overall?
The first obvious effect will probably be the demise of Nintendo as an absolute leader among casual gamers. Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Golf, etc. will all have abundant (and much better looking) analogues on the PS3 and the 360. Of course, Nintendo's existing lead is significant, and they will likely retain the overall number 1 spot, but the field will be quite leveled in terms of attracting new casual gamers, especially if Microsoft and Sony release scaled down, price competitive version of their consoles targeted specifically at the casual gamer. In turn, the natural response from Nintendo would be to release a HD-capable version of the Wii at which point the 3 consoles will be pretty much in dead heat competition for the casual gamers' dollars. The differences in Wii Motion Plus vs. Motion Controller vs. Natal technology will in all likelihood not matter a hell of a lot for this segment of the market - all three will be more than good enough to let grandma bowl her heart out. The overall effect on the landscape of games is that there will be even more simple casual-style games suitable for motion controls out there than there are today.
The second major effect will be a revolution in the genre of on-rails games, notably shooters. Why on-rails? Because as we already discussed, motion controls are not very practical for free-roaming games, and using a combination of two controllers at the same time is not much better. Therefore, the best solution would be to automate or vastly simplify most of the movement (i.e. put the game on rails) and focus on letting the player have a blast with the actual shooting where motion-based technologies really hit the sweet spot. If this works correctly, an explosion in the number and variety of on-rails games will follow (provided they are embraced by the players, of course). And the difference between Natal and Motion Controller in this particular niche? Well, this is where it gets interesting.
The one glaring difference between Motion Controller and Natal is of course the presence of a physical controller. Did you notice that glowing red sphere on Sony's prototype device? That sphere is what allows the video processing equipment to accurately project a sword, a baseball bat, a gun, etc. onto the tip of the player's hand. The key word here is "accurately" - a word that is extremely important for shooters. Accuracy - not just speed - is clearly one area that Sony is targeting very aggressively, and even though their presenter had some trouble making his virtual shots connect, at least they felt confident enough to show something requiring this level of precision, which means that they expect to get it right by launch time. Microsoft, by contrast, stuck to things like Ricochet and Paint where only very approximate accuracy was really required. Whether Natal can ever achieve the required precision without putting a controller in the player's hand is something that remains to be seen, and there is a real possibility that Sony may indeed end up getting ahead in this aspect. This one is a true battle of the technical whiz-dudes.
The third area of change will of course concern the player immersion factor in games like Fable, and here, unless Sony steps up to produce matching capabilities, Microsoft will have an edge. Natal's voice recognition technology definitely matters here, and because the players don't have to hold a controller in their hands, virtual conversations with on-screen characters have the potential to have a truly life-like quality.
One final area which we haven't yet touched upon, but which is actually a great fit for these new technologies is mini-games - little pieces of game goodness which developers like to sprinkle around in just about every genre. Today's mini-games usually come in one of two varieties:
1) Some kind of variation on traditional card or puzzle games. These games are proven fun, but are normally only loosely connected to the outside game in the context o of which they exist, and so can be a distraction,
or
2) Simulated models built around an activity within the larger game (think lock-picking mini-game in Splinter Cell). These mini games tie in well with their "parent" games, but their actual playability is limited, which makes them more like simulations and less like true games.
Real-time video processing (and, in case of Natal, voice recognition) open up a whole slew of additional possibilities in this space which can add a lot of pleasant variety to mini-games and make them both highly contextual and very playable at the same time. All those casual games where you can swing your arms around would make great mini-games in any lengthy adventure, action, or RPG game. They could provide a nice "get up and stretch your bones" intermission without the risk of scaring off the player by turning the entire outside game into exercise.
So, let's recap.
1) Both Microsoft and Sony want a piece of the Nintendo casual gamer pie - and both will get one. Specific differences between their technologies won't matter for casual gamers.
2) We may see an explosion in the genre of on-rails games. Sony may have a technological edge here, because at this stage of the game their technology looks more likely to achieve not only the speed, but also the precision required for shooters.
3) Games will get more immersive, and Microsoft games may go a step further than Sony's in this matter due to Natal's added capabilities around voice processing.
4) Mini-games will probably get a hell of a lot more interesting to play, and more contextual at the same time. This is true for both Sony and Microsoft games, so the winner here is the player.
So will they succeed?
Of course, a lot of questions remain, the most basic one among them being, "can they really make this technology work?" But even if they do, other factors still come into play. One, will consumers buy these devices? As we all know, making optional add-ons to existing consoles sell is terribly difficult business. Two, will the developers really embrace the technology en masse? As Nintendo proves over and over again, cute new controllers don't create games by themselves (even if they sell millions of hardware units). And three, will the players take the leap of faith and come along for the ride? For we are a fickle bunch and liable to change our likes and dislikes at will, giant corporations be damned.
Only time will tell. For now, just keep playing.
- Vaga
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(4 Comments, click to add yours)
On Sat, Jun 13, 2009, 06:50 PM dcbronco said:
On Sat, Jun 13, 2009, 07:17 PM JDot4 said:
On Sat, Jun 13, 2009, 08:08 PM doa766 said:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2009, 05:21 PM Peter said:
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