Kinect 2.0: What Was The Plan?
The Xbox One was released with the Kinect 2.0, which had all the same motion detection abilities of the original and more. It could detect a player's heart rate and track precise joint manipulation.
Nobody, including Microsoft really did anything impressive with these features. And now, of course, the Xbox One can be sold without a Kinect at all.
I've probably talked about part of what's dumb about this before. If you sell every console with the device, third parties can expect people to have it and can program games to use it. When it's no longer sold standard, third parties must assume the player doesn't have it and can add features to use it if they choose to (but most third parties won't choose to).
But then there's the real thing that puzzles me... If they didn't have any plans to use these features or show what the Kinect can do from the beginning, why did they bother to make the blasted thing in the first place? It takes a lot of time and effort (which translates to money for a business) to make a device like that, and they apparently had no plans to put it to use.
I've heard just a few good ideas that the new Kinect could be used for. The best is a game where you're a wizard casting spells, and it takes elaborate gestures to use a spell you know. It could be used for a decent Dragonball Z game where you gesture to use character attacks (and I'm not talking about the existing DBZ Kinect game, I've heard how bad that is). Dance games seem to work well, and you could use it to make the absolute best exercise game the world has ever seen.
Otherwise, there isn't much you can do that others won't do as well. I've heard of using the player's heart rate to affect things in a horror game, but it sounds gimmicky. So really, what was the plan when they started researching this game? Was it worth it to make a device that offers competition to Wii Fit when they didn't have so much as a single game in the works to take advantage of its capabilities? It baffles me to no end!
