I think with something like tennis they could have the tilt, speed and forehand/backhand position 1:1, but the height of the swing would probably be fixed so that it would be practical for making contact with the ball. Maybe a high and low, but not 1:1. The same goes for golf and baseball.
Introducing Wii MotionPlus, Nintendo improves Wiimote
- Thread starter patsu
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I think with something like tennis they could have the tilt, speed and forehand/backhand position 1:1, but the height of the swing would probably be fixed so that it would be practical for making contact with the ball. Maybe a high and low, but not 1:1. The same goes for golf and baseball.
How do you do so with online PC gaming?, when one person might have a crappy old ball mouse and another a expensive high precision mouse.. Or console gaming in, for instance, a racing game where some will have a full wheel/peddal addon and others just a controller, its not an issue there so why is it one here?
This is a very unexpected and extremely welcome announcement, I have to admit it has me quite excited. Though I'm not 100% sure if it can actually help all current games, it may be something that requires developer support. In which case Nintendo better be giving them away with certain popular games and selling them by themselves for £10, otherwise it won't get the support it deserves.
The baseball game in Wii Sports already does that.. You're last sentence is solved pretty easily by difficulty/sensetivity settings. As it has been for years, if its too hard for you (whatever the age) change to an easier setting. Meanwhile the hardcore gamers Wii also apeals to can have the option of more accurate and challenging controls.
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This is enabling technology - in the discussion I referred to above, I observed that in just about all physical games, the interface and rules are extremely simple. 2-3 year olds can get the idea, and it is extremely easy to get into most physical games, and yet they can offer offer feedback and satisfaction as far as skill building goes for the rest of your life.
Computer games do not, as a rule, work like that. There are several issues involved as to why, but one of the reasons is that computers do not offer the straightforward physical control that grants accessibility, feedback and skill building.
The Wii is a cheap commercially successful example showing that even a relatively simple motion recognition can offer a compelling experience. The physical to screen correspondence isn't perfect, and isn't likely to be in the future either, so the same degree of skill building and tactile satisfaction that physical games offer will probably never quite be there. On the other hand, the abstraction offers a wider gamut of virtual experiences. You can pick up your shield and sword and fight with venom-spitting dragons for instance, drive a jet-ski down rapids or whatever strikes your fancy, and have a sufficiently strong physical correspondence to the virtual world that the experience is both satisfying in its own right, and allows skill building and the accompanying sense of achievement.
So while the players do not start out as fully trained jedi, they can aspire to become damn good light-saber fighters, (and also use The Force via the nun-chuck.
) And they can potentially test their skills against others around the world, or fight along side them. Or imagine the battles of Middle-Earth fought by individuals making up armies, and they are fighting using their skill, not their "stats".
This would be very different from what we have today, and IMO vastly superior. Again, this is enabling technology - it opens up possibilities we can only hope will be pursued. If all that comes of it is slightly better golf games - well, that's decided by the games industry.
Computer games do not, as a rule, work like that. There are several issues involved as to why, but one of the reasons is that computers do not offer the straightforward physical control that grants accessibility, feedback and skill building.
The Wii is a cheap commercially successful example showing that even a relatively simple motion recognition can offer a compelling experience. The physical to screen correspondence isn't perfect, and isn't likely to be in the future either, so the same degree of skill building and tactile satisfaction that physical games offer will probably never quite be there. On the other hand, the abstraction offers a wider gamut of virtual experiences. You can pick up your shield and sword and fight with venom-spitting dragons for instance, drive a jet-ski down rapids or whatever strikes your fancy, and have a sufficiently strong physical correspondence to the virtual world that the experience is both satisfying in its own right, and allows skill building and the accompanying sense of achievement.
So while the players do not start out as fully trained jedi, they can aspire to become damn good light-saber fighters, (and also use The Force via the nun-chuck.
) And they can potentially test their skills against others around the world, or fight along side them. Or imagine the battles of Middle-Earth fought by individuals making up armies, and they are fighting using their skill, not their "stats".This would be very different from what we have today, and IMO vastly superior. Again, this is enabling technology - it opens up possibilities we can only hope will be pursued. If all that comes of it is slightly better golf games - well, that's decided by the games industry.
Apparently, EA just announced that Tiger 10 and an unnamed tennis game will support Motionplus later this year.
It'll be interesting to see if they deliver something really different or it's just PR.
Ideally, most people would have their poor form replicated on the screen, by Tiger or Federer.
And you can have Nadal do one-handed backspin swings all day, just by how you hold and swing the Motionplus controller.
Or maybe for licensing and other reasons (game designers want to maintain a certain look to the games), you will only get the canned animations representing these star athletes, their signature styles.
It'll be interesting to see if they deliver something really different or it's just PR.
Ideally, most people would have their poor form replicated on the screen, by Tiger or Federer.
And you can have Nadal do one-handed backspin swings all day, just by how you hold and swing the Motionplus controller.
Or maybe for licensing and other reasons (game designers want to maintain a certain look to the games), you will only get the canned animations representing these star athletes, their signature styles.
It'll be interesting to see how they handle those design issues. I think even with canned animations as they're doing now, the ability to detect movements with greater accuracy would still be a great improvement. Tennis seems like it would be much harder to deal with than golf, because it has to be quick and responsive, where in golf you can capture an input and then have a delay on screen before showing an animation if you wanted.
The Wii audience is already hard for third parties to penetrate so I don't really like this attachment. It might be nice for a couple of types of games but it sounds like it will mostly be used as a novelty. I don't like the idea of any game requiring it but it might make a moderate upgrade to FPS or sports games.
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
It wont do anything for FPS games as they us the IR for the aiming and MO+ doesnt do anything to that. I think Iwata said they are keen on trying and get as much people as possible to use it which would make sense if its as good as they say it it because than it would make the wii remote into what it should have been in the first place. Iwata said they want to keep it cheap so I wouldnt be suprised if at launch they will just add build it into new wii remotes by default. If they couple the upgrade with something like Wii sports 2 or a few AAA games I think alot of people will use it pretty fast.
I think it's an urban legend and the situation is likely to get better and and better as editors are shifting more ressources toward Wii projects and user base grows. Even if the user base is overall more focused toward party games as its size grows the percentage of users likely to buy more "standard games" (as found on the ps360) becomes more and more relevant. I would not be surprised if not too far from now the Wii becomes a limitating factors for multi platforms games.
This month in US the Wii scored 9 titles in the top 20, 5 of this games are third party.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22308
(Between I would like to see a real top20 ie cleared from portable data).
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Why would it be a gimmick, do you know exactly what it does?
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In July 2008 I wrote:
Entropy said:
Sometimes it's depressing to be proven correct. However, not much time has passed, and it's not really surprising that these games are where the first uses show up. The potential of better motion recognition technology is so much more however.
I've often thought about the continued popularity of FPS games, despite being horribly repetitive in both game-play and content themes. What are we shooting up today? Demons, terrorists, zombies, orcs, mutants and aliens are splattered over and over and over again in evermore gory detail.
I think one of the main reasons for their popularity is familiarity of control. If you've played a few of these games, basic control is in place from the moment you start playing, and you can immediately immerse yourself in the game. And as you've played more of them, the control scheme becomes ever more second nature and your basic skill in all these games grow.
IMO motion recognition is an even more powerful enabler than standardized control schemes. They have little to no threshold before they feel natural and intuitive, because you're using basically the same physical movement that the game simulates. And they enable control skill building, assuming that the motion sensing is sufficiently sensitive.
These kinds of sports games are obvious places to immediately put better motion sensing to work. But it would be gratifying to hear that developers do something else with it. A sword fighting game seems just as obvious, for instance, and with infintely more heroic potential.
Well the tennis game is called Grand Slam Tennis, the only tennis game which will have Wimbledon.
So we'll see how much better MotionPlus is.
My guess is, it won't let you do the things I outlined, just have more detection of different kinds of motions to play different canned animation.
But not true 1:1 rendering of the input.
So we'll see how much better MotionPlus is.
My guess is, it won't let you do the things I outlined, just have more detection of different kinds of motions to play different canned animation.
But not true 1:1 rendering of the input.
In July 2008 I wrote:
Sometimes it's depressing to be proven correct. However, not much time has passed, and it's not really surprising that these games are where the first uses show up. The potential of better motion recognition technology is so much more however.
I've often thought about the continued popularity of FPS games, despite being horribly repetitive in both game-play and content themes. What are we shooting up today? Demons, terrorists, zombies, orcs, mutants and aliens are splattered over and over and over again in evermore gory detail.
I think one of the main reasons for their popularity is familiarity of control. If you've played a few of these games, basic control is in place from the moment you start playing, and you can immediately immerse yourself in the game. And as you've played more of them, the control scheme becomes ever more second nature and your basic skill in all these games grow.
IMO motion recognition is an even more powerful enabler than standardized control schemes. They have little to no threshold before they feel natural and intuitive, because you're using basically the same physical movement that the game simulates. And they enable control skill building, assuming that the motion sensing is sufficiently sensitive.
These kinds of sports games are obvious places to immediately put better motion sensing to work. But it would be gratifying to hear that developers do something else with it. A sword fighting game seems just as obvious, for instance, and with infintely more heroic potential.
I think that motion controls without some sort of haptic interface won't be such a great revolution. Most of the time, it just turns into waggle.
Would you really want that, in a game like this?
These kinds of sports games are obvious places to immediately put better motion sensing to work. But it would be gratifying to hear that developers do something else with it. A sword fighting game seems just as obvious, for instance, and with infintely more heroic potential.
There are other games announced already with Motion Plus support, for instance Red Steel 2, which has the sword fighting your referring to.
Of course, people wouldn't want true 1:1 in a Tennis game. Only people who are good at Tennis could play it as they wouldn't be able to add difficulty settings with player assisted shots.
Exactly! Sports games are about giving players an artificial boost in abilities. True 1:1 mapping would never work. What's needed is 1:1 intention interpretation, where the player's decisions are accurately determined and the player character executes them. So unlike WiiSports Tennis where any old waggle could cause a shot, Wii Tennis should determine what the player is intending - backhand, forehand, smash, lob - from how the are holding and moving the Wiimote, and have their avatar execute that with the skills of the avatar character. Likewise the obvious candidate of a Lightsabre game. No mortal could wield a Lightsabre like a Jedi, so 1:1 mapping would be useless. But the way a player moves the Wiimote would tell the game what they're trying to to, and it should 'fill in the details' so the player feels like they're that good, without them having to put in the years and years of training and meditation and levitating rocks.
Heh.
This is where we have differed before, and where we differ still.
In my view, the ability to build actual kinetic skill is one of the most promising aspects of motion recognition. Not as important as accessibility in the greater scheme of things, but the aspect that hold the most attraction for me personally as an enabler of game mechanics I value.
Imagine a MMORPG where the clan "Swordsmen of Bul'gur" is a group of people who are actually skilled with their virtual swords. No stats. No mining of ore for hours and hours fighting kobolds of different hues to indicate different levels, yielding skillpoints you can put into "Swordsmanship" and "Stamina". Or imagine being one of the good Jedi, fighting a Sith and your virtual life depends on your skill, rather than how many points you put in "Lightsaber". (It transfers to other game genres as well of course, the imagination is the limit here.)
It's a different way to approach these kinds of games, and in my view, way more satisfying. You can still adjust single player games for different levels of player skill of course, using a variety of mechanics. And nothing says that other types of games can't use more of a general gesture recognition scheme. But what intrigues me specifically is the promise of kinetic skill building, and the implied transferability of skill between games just as with ASWD + mouselook games, only more natural.