EA prototyping Fight Night Kinect
Would be a "totally different game".
EA Sports is investigating how a Kinect-enabled Fight Night game would work best for fans of the boxing game series – and has even conducted prototyping.
Fight Night Champion, due out next month and previewed this morning by Eurogamer's Will Porter, does not support Sony's Move controller or Microsoft's Kinect add-on.
"It's a little bit too twitch-based, not to mention the fact that standing on your feet for three minutes and throwing punches is something that, believe it or not, might be beyond the fitness level of most gamers!" gameplay producer Brian Hayes told Eurogamer in August last year– before both Move and Kinect launched.
Now, just weeks before the release of Fight Night Champion, producer Mike Mahar has told Eurogamer EA Sports is figuring out how to make a Kinect boxing game as we speak.
"It's an interesting proposition," he said. "Undeniably at some point we're going to want to integrate motion controls into our game somehow, whether that's in a mini-game or a separate game I don't know.
"Right now the best simulation experience we can give users is through a conventional controller. I also think that most of our users don't want to, and can't, punch for 10 rounds! I just don't think people are capable of it! If you're going to make a full fighting game it might be a different experience than a Fight Night or an MMA..."
Kinect, which enables Xbox 360 owners to control games with their bodies, is the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time.
While its launch line-up of games focused on mainstream gamers, Microsoft has promised to release games aimed squarely at the core gamer this year and beyond.
For Mahar, Kinect integration for Fight Night means more than mini-games - indeed it would probably lead to a separate release.
"It's definitely something we're looking at," he added. "We've done some pretty cool prototyping. It could perhaps be a mini-game embedded in. Then again with how precise and how robust the movement and motion controls are now, I think we'd be doing them a disservice if we simply said that our version of a motion control game is a mini-game within Fight Night.
"I think we'd best serve the community, if we're going to do anything ever, with a totally different game. That's the speculation on my part."