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One of the biggest sellers in the gaming world is the Mass Effect franchise and at E3 we were mesmerized to hear how the Kinect was going to enhance the experience. Well, it’s not as comprehensive as actually tromping through the alien landscape in your living room, but it does add some convenient voice commands that keep you engrossed in the game as if you were actually there.
Mass Effect 3 with Kinect was shown off at CES, but the live demo was sort of limited as to what it showed, leaving out things like the much heralded dialog selector by voice and the weapon builder, but it did give us a pretty good idea about how the game would work other than that, and we have to say that it was actually pretty natural. Perhaps that is because we are used to yelling at the guy anyway, as if he could hear us. The good news is now he can.
But don’t expect to say things like “James, get off your butt and frag that guy!” The commands are far simpler than that, akin to the Xbox Live voice interface. In other words, expect to say stuff like ‘Liara, attack!” or “James! Carnage!” or “shotgun”. Even though the vocabulary is limited, if you did open it up to hundreds of thousands of phrases, the delay would be significantly higher and the chance of being understood much less, so better this way than that. There was a slight delay, around a second, but it didn’t seem to be any longer than doing it by hand.
For me, choosing weapons by voice was a godsend. I often get frazzled in the moment of heavy fire and find myself having trouble switching to the weapon I want quickly when I need to. Even though the demo only had the shotgun, switching to it was a breeze. I imagine when there is a whole slew of firepower at my disposal, it will be so much quicker for me to get what I want rather than trying to find it.
Bioware will release an official demo on February 14, 2012 that will show all of the Kinect features in the campaign and cooperative modes with a large intro that will feature the attack on Earth and the massive war with a group of aliens called the Reapers. The preview will be for the Xbox 360, PS3 and the PC, though only the Xbox 360 will have the Kinect features obviously, despite the fact that the Kinect will be available for Windows by then.
Mass Effect 3 is suspected to be out in March 2012…
