A recent article on GamePro's website listed 27 ways that game consoles can be saved.
Among the signs that salvation is needed is the alleged disinterest of PlayStation 3 developers in the motion controls of the Sixaxis controller:
Motion sensing: use it or lose it
The Sixaxis's motion controls continue to be ignored by the vast majority of PS3 developers. Why is that?
One game that has plenty of motion control is "Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction." The Sixaxis controller is used to steer tornados shot from one of Ratchet's crazy space-guns, to direct the Lombax through his skydiving routines, to tilt the board in a mini-game based those old wooden labyrinth toys and a few other things. Motion control is not used in other parts of the game where you might expect it: to steer Ratchet's spaceship during shooter stages or to control a ground vehicle.
How did this all come about? How did Insomniac put motion-control in the game, and how did the developers decide when to leave it out?
"Ratchet & Clank Future" creative director Brian Allgeier and I talked about this last week. Among the things I found interesting was his talk of the problems of mixing motion controls and stick controls for unified bits of gameplay.
A short interview follows. Here's one highlight, regarding focus groups:
And we found in our focus tests that there were some people that were fans of Sixaxis and some people that were not. So we made sure to give the option to turn it off.
Multiplayer: How did you decide where to incorporate motion control into the game?
Brian Allgeier: We have a very collaborative design process. Often people [at Insomniac] just suggest that maybe here is a good spot for motion control. A good example is that the tornado launcher didn't have Sixaxis control before. You just fired the tornado, picked up a few guys and that was pretty cool. And then we thought, wow, you could control the twister. one of the QA guys, Billy Parmenter suggested we use the Sixaxis.
The Geo-Laser was the same way too. It was just a rather straight-forward, draw the laser on the wall and follow the dots. We felt like Sixaxis would make it a different type of challenge.
And then some stuff is actually designed around the Sixaxis, like the decrypter challenges. Our UI designer, Jake Sones, designed that.
We're very conscious of making sure the Sixaxis control mapped to what you were doing and what you wanted it to do. So we felt that stuff like the decrypter where you're tilting a board or even with Ratchet free-falling where you were tilting him that it really mimicked the motion you were making with the controller.
Multiplayer: If memory serves you didn't use it with the spaceship sequences, is that right?
Allgeier: That's right.
Multiplayer: Why not?
Allgeier: We wanted to let the player both dodge and aim. We found that if you were trying to both move the whole controller to move the ship and you were trying to move the reticule at the same time, that it works in short bursts. Like with the tornado launcher: if you were to fire out a tornado you could still maybe run Ratchet to the side while still directing it. It's not something you want to do for sustained periods of time.
And we found in our focus tests that there were some people that were fans of Sixaxis and some people that were not. So we made sure to give the option to turn it off. We turned it off of a vehicle we thought it would work perfectly for. There's this vehicle called the Gyro Cycle that we had Sixaxis on. And in our focus tests we found that people were having problems. So we removed it.
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There you have it: a game not exactly built around motion control, but instead one for which motion control has been applied here and there, where a consensus can agree that it works. Is that the approach you'd like to see more developers take with Sixaxis motion controls? Or would you rather they either build their games around motion from the start -- otherwise leaving it out altogether?
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