Mass Effect 3 confirmed "Better on Kinect"

BioWare has confirmed that Mass Effect 3 will include Kinect functionality with the Xbox 360 version of the highly anticipated roleplaying game.

However, 360 gamers don’t have to worry about having to hop around their living room or making pistols with their fingers and shouting “Pew! Pew! Pew!” to fire. Mass Effect 3 will be utilizing Kinect’s voice recognition feature. Instead of selecting what to say with a controller, the player can now say the phrase at the bottom of the screen to begin a dialog. In addition, squad commands can be issued.

While the PC and PlayStation 3 are certainly capable of utilizing voice recognition through a normal mic, the reason only the Xbox 360 version is getting the voice recog is that Kinect does its voice recog through internal hardware, meaning Bioware doesn’t have to do any additional programming - Kinect does it all for the developers.

Mass Effect 3 will be released for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sometime in early 2012.