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Xbox Boss Says Future of Kinect is In Developers Hands

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Phil Spencer says there is hope for the Kinect

In an interview with GamesRadar Xbox Boss Phil Spencer said that the future of Kinect lays with consumers and developers

First introduced with the Xbox 360 the Kinect has had a rough road trying to find an audience. When the original Kinect came out on the market many gamers saw it as an overpriced gimmick, its functionality didn’t help much. It wasn’t until the Xbox One came bundled with Kinect 2.o that gamers could even see what it was capable of. The only down side of that is that it made the Xbox One $100 more expensive than its chief competitor the PS4.

It took Microsoft dropping the Kinect bundle, dropping the Xbox One’s price by that crucial $100 to turn things around. The price drop helped the Xbox One finally beat out the PS4 first during the holidays and for a few months after. The huge success of the Xbox One without the Kinect had gamers wondering if Microsoft was planning to drop for support for the peripheral. Microsoft originally said that the Kinect would be a central part of the Xbox One and its games, now its being used less than the original. Wanting to clear up the confusion Phil Spencer sat down with GamesRadar.

He stressed that Xbox was far from giving up on the Kinect, saying they just finished work on Upload Studio 2.0 where users can do green screening with the Kinect. According Spencer they still plan to create new functions for the Kinect to open up possibilities for developers and consumers. Pricing, however, is still a major part of selling a console and Spencer knows that. Admitting that over the holidays when the price point was dropped their sales numbers shot up and that is something the Xbox brand wants to keep going.

Ultimately Specer said the future of the Kinect is up to consumers and developers deciding to take advantage of it. They will continue to grow its functionality in the hopes that it will grab attention.

“[Kinect’s] place will be earned through the experiences that are out there and the developers that show interest. We will continue to build functionality through voice and using the RGB and depth cameras, and we’ll stay focused on that, but giving the consumers choice is pretty critical.”

Right now developers and consumers both don’t seem eager to take advantage of the peripheral with developers still focusing on controller based games. The Kinect’s greatest hope right now is HoloLens and other peripherals that it can be combined with to create a unique experience.

Source: GamesRadar

Just like most other people are here, Ryan is very passionate about gaming and technology. When he's not writing about video games, you'll likely find him talking about the latest gadgets.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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