The coding behind Natal is ”an incredible feat” but its lack of physical peripheral and ”lag on the input” is ”really going to restrict” genres.
”I was actually more impressed with Sony’s motion capture solution than Microsoft’s Natal,” Jon Burton, Traveller’s Tales company director, told Develop.
Natal is, he said, ”exceedingly clever, but the lag on the input and lack of physical buttons is really going to restrict the kind of games that can be done with it.” Sony’s anonymous motion tech has impressed him more, simply for its familiarity.
”Sony’s solution will be cheap, accurate and will put buttons at your fingertips, meaning everything from action adventures to FPSes can be handled with the same input.” It’s that there’s no tool of precision like an analogue stick or mouse with Natal, which will make certain game genres difficult to translate onto it.
It’s been suggested before that Natal could recognise controllers or such in the hands of gamers and use them accordingly, but this of course defeats the point of Natal.
”The software behind Natal stunned me,” praises Burton. “To be able to take effectively a bump-map of a person and turn that into a fully articulated and rigged polygonal skeleton is an incredible feat. We run a mo-cap studio and to get anything resembling mo-cap, live in real-time, from effectively a single camera is nothing short of amazing.”
Microsoft will be unveiling more of Natal at their Gamefest conference in February, where developers and the videogames press core will be buzzing around for scoops.
