- opogjijijp
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Q: I hear Bungie had an early look at Project Natal, the motion-sensing controller for the Xbox coming next year. Will we have to get up off the couch to play Halo one of these days?
A: I think the Natal stuff is awesome. I'll put one in my house just so when I walk in the living room it will sign me in. I might put one in the garage so I sign in and get my favorite music when I walk in the door. It's definitely cool. It's hard to imagine you're going to replicate pulling a trigger.
I could see my engineering team when I look at it and go 'this is (bleeping) awesome, we should navigate all the UI with it!' They're like, 'I don't even know how it works yet, stop adding it to my schedule.'
It remains to be seen what we can get done with it in the timeframe we have for the games under development. It is relatively new. As they said in the (E3) briefing, it's just now coming out, it's not coming to market yet. We don't know when it's going to be in the market yet. If it's not going to be in the market we probably won't spend a lot of time devving for it. If it looks like it's coming out, we'll definitely add support where it makes sense in the game. But I don't think it's going to be the primary gaming mode for a Halo game - because I think all of my developers and testers would drop dead from attempting to run, duck, crouch, circle strafe...
Q: If Natal came out at the same time as Halo Reach next fall, it could help make the new hardware platform, similar to the way Halo established the first Xbox.
A:: Absolutely.
Q: Could Halo Reach be Natal-enabled?
A: I absolutely think Reach could be enabled with it. Historically we've looked at lots of different control methods for the Halo games. Certainly other stuff from Microsoft - new controller layouts, we always work on them and everything else. One of the problems with the Halo games is we've got whatever it is, 8 or 10 million or 12 million people who have played and liked the game ... a lot of the ones who are playing it all the time are very attached to their control scheme and they're the most vocal group. We couldn't do anything that would hurt the state of what people love as we implement new controls.
Q: It seems to me you don't have to give up the controller with Natal - you could have precision with the controller and still have to jump over logs or whatever in the game.
A: Yep, and make a whole era of fit gamers, which I think would be great.