Kinect Support Coming For Halo Waypoint… But Not Halo 4
The Bad News
In an interview with CVG Frank O’Connor, Halo Development Director at 343 Industries, has unfortunately confirmed that Halo 4 won’t support Kinect. He gives the following excuse:
“More than most other games, it is directly linked to the muscle memory of holding an Xbox controller, going back as far as the days of the Duke on the first Xbox.”
But I think it’s just a combination of time, since Kinect games are often subject to delays (I’m sure Microsoft wouldn’t want to risk delaying a game from their main franchise), and all the irrational Kinect bashing that maybe Microsoft are worried could harm Halo’s image. I know Halo Anniversary had a tiny bit of Kinect support but it wasn’t included on the disc and even that tiny bit of OPTIONAL (apart from the analysing feature, which wasn’t part of the original Halo: Combat Evolved anyway) Kinect support got the usual haters all worked up unfortunately.
Personally I can think of plenty of ways Kinect could be used, not just full Kinect controls. Even something simple like head tracking, to look around independently from aiming, would have been a nice feature to add to Halo 4, or any first-person game for that matter.
The Good News
The little bit of good news is that Halo Waypoint, the Xbox 360 dashboard hub for all things Halo, will support Kinect in some way at aome point:
“Kinect is a logical extension of the UI, and with regards to some of the sci-fi themes we’re actually pretty excited about it, but not for the controls,” he said.
“That’s not what it’s for, and we would never try to shoehorn that into our game. But there’s a lot of cool experiences that we’re going to put on Waypoint in the future that’s completely appropriate for the experience.”
How do you feel about Halo 4 not supporting Kinect? And what Kinect features, such as head tracking, would you like to see in future Halo games? Bear in mind that the next Halo game, or at least Halo 5, will most likely be a next-gen Xbox game so if it does have Kinect features it will use Kinect 2 since that’s what it will be bundled with (allegedly, according to all the rumours and leaks) which obviously will be a lot better than Kinect 1 so you can probably think about things like finger tracking when coming up with ideas.
Source: CVG
Kinect was a failure. Any device with only ONE must-buy series (Dance Central) and 5 or 6 good games (Rise, Eden, Gunstringer, Leela, Fruit, Sports) would be considered the worst gaming device of all time. Kinect doesn’t even deserve to be attached to Halo 4. I’m not even an FPS fan and Halo 4 looks amazing, GOTY-material even to me.
Kinect support in Halo Anniversary was great. All the non-Kinect people were pissed that only Kinect owners had access to the scanning. It’s their damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If you provide support for both the controller and the Kinect, people say why use the Kinect. If you provide support for only the Kinect, it leaves out people who don’t have a Kinect.