> @flawless
>
> Still don’t believe you. I love how you word things. I’m not asking you to reveal ‘all your personal details to a random online’, only an idiot would do that. And why would you lie about this? Wow, you have to ask that question? This is the internet mate.
This is what I mean, you’re such a cynic. It really is sad, you must be such an embittered person and you have my pity.
If you really care PM me your email address and I’ll prove who I am.
> And I know the library looks like it has gesture controls as well as voice. My point is that it feels tacked on. The entire library seems to have no way be built specifically for Kinect. It feels like the idea of using Kinect to access has been shoe-horned in. I honestly wouldn’t mind if Kinect users got some feature that wouldn’t be plausible for someone with a controller. That makes a lot of sense.
Care to hazard a guess at what they could have done? There is pretty much nothing they could do with Kinect that couldn’t be mapped to a button press. So whatever they’d done you could have argued that it “seemed tacked on”.
> Can’t you see that this content has been intentionally walled off for no other reason than to make it exclusive to Kinect? Is there any harm at all in letting the library be accessed by a controller other than financial?
You don’t know that, and frankly I don’t know that either, but I’m not so arrogant as to assert my viewpoint whilst patronising someone else’s. It’s obvious that there are financial motivations, the game only exists in the first place for financial reasons.
I’ve worked in development for a long time and I’ve never known a dev choose to “wall off” content, in my experience it just doesn’t happen, least of all at a flagship developer like 343i. It’s unlikely we’ll never know for sure, but I’d be astounded if what you’re saying is true.
A developer pitches a game to a publisher, in this case 343i and Saber pitch to Microsoft. They tell Microsoft all of the features they’re going to deliver along with a delivery date and a cost. Microsoft review that and either agree or disagree. In all likelihood Microsoft will have said “We could really do with a Kinect feature in there”.
343 will then have come back and said “We can do voice commands in game and we could also do this feature we’re calling The Library, it’s a bit like the Autovista mode in Forza, you ‘collect’ objects in game and then we’ll have a model viewer with stats and stuff. It’s gonna cost an extra $40k to add” Microsoft agree and greenlight the project. That $40k it costs to add the feature wouldn’t have otherwise been available.
What you’re describing is that Microsoft have come in, looked at the game and said “Are there any features here we can lock off and make Kinect exclusive so we can say it’s better with Kinect?”
That’s just not a mentality I’ve ever come across in first party publishing, with developers like 343 the mentality is to give more, not less.
> Now, sure it’s only a minor feature but it’s the principle. If someone does something wrong it’s the principle that bothers me not the severity. If someone walked up to your wallet and opened it up and took a dollar out of it would you just say “ah well, it’s only a dollar?”
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> It’s 343’s actions that I disagree with, not the severity. If we give developers an inch they’ll take a mile. Today it’s just a Library feature. If they feel like they can they’ll take us all for a ride. Who knows what amounts of content will be walled off to promote superfluous peripherals. What about needing a Windows phone to play Firefight? Sure that’s ridiculous but it’s the same principle. Where do we draw the line?
I think a large part of this debate boils down to whether the Library would have existed if it wasn’t for Kinect. Well, this would be a pretty expensive feature to add (you’re talking tens of thousands of dollars) and gives very little additional value to the project without being Kinect exclusive.
How many extra copies of the game would they sell if they’d added the library as part of the vanilla feature set accessible with the D-Pad? Probably none. It doesn’t broaden your market at all. So why would they have ever been planning to add it?
By adding it as a Kinect feature they’ll probably sell a few thousand extra copies of the game to Kinect owners as well as selling some Kinects to Halo fans.
Now just think about that for a second:
If the library had always been there and could be accessed by the D-Pad it adds no value to the game in terms of sales potential.
Adding the library as a Kinect feature sells them more games and more Kinects.
Why would they ever have considered adding it as a feature you could access without Kinect?
Kinect is a big step and you would know it if you knew what you can do with it. Specially on the pc.