Motion control gaming raises questions about the future of gaming interfaces and the lifespan of the traditional controller. Whenever a new technology is developed, advocates rush to pronounce it as the way forward and denounce established technologies as obsolete. Is there an argument to turn away from our keyboards and mice and control pads to embrace this new generation of controllers?

 

At a Eurogamer Expo developer session in October, Guerrilla Games’ Steven Ter Heide demonstrated the optional Move integration for the upcoming first person shooter Killzone 3. “Move, for us, is an option. Obviously there’ll be DualShock lovers and there will certainly be people out there who want to play this with the Move controller.”

 

Guerrilla has been heavily playtesting the motion controls for Killzone 3 to determine what players wanted from this new control scheme. “The book hasn’t been written yet on Move controls and what they need to do. There’s a lot of stuff we have to figure out.” Move has all the same buttons of a DualShock controller but Guerrilla are trying to integrate gestures to provide alternatives to relying on those buttons. “This icon on the screen now indicates that I need to reload, and I can do this by just a quick twist of the wrist. We find this has an advantage in the fluidity of the gameplay,” said Ter Heide. Another example Ter Heide provided was demonstrating how gesturing towards the player picked up useable weapons.

 

The feel of the demonstration was such that the developers seemed to be trying to find reasons to use motion control, and running into more than just a few problems doing so. Ter Heide highlighted this with an example of how grenades are thrown in Killzone 3, “You’d expect everybody to throw a grenades like this (demonstrates throwing motion) because it’s a natural motion, but as you can see, what happens on the screen is that the camera starts rotating and I don’t see where the grenade lands.” Guerrilla’s solution was to forgo the gesture and relegate the grenade throw to a button push.

 

Of all the questions raised by integrating motion controllers into a FPS title like Killzone 3, multiplayer competitiveness is one of the most important. “Move is available for multiplayer too, and right now we are doing a lot of play testing to find out whether we can have Move players in the same game as DualShock players,” Ter Heide said. “Our core QA guys have grown up with DualShock and they’re very well versed in that and run circles around the Move players,” he said, adding that choice of control method may become a basis for rivalry. “At some point I think it’s going to turn into your snow boarders versus your skiers, whether you’re a DualShock player or a Move player.”

 

A balancing act may be required if DualShock and Move players are going to inhabit the same multiplayer matches. Besides the camera control issues discussed earlier, certain functions of the game mechanics are unique to Move. “Because we now have auto-lock with Move we need to find out if we can rebalance that and see how that works.” Guerrilla aims to test a public beta of the multiplayer game, and based on the results of that test, decide whether or not to separate DualShock and Move players online.

 

Time will tell whether the experiment will work but based on what I saw at the session, and my own preferences for game controllers, the Move integration appears to be more of a gimmick than a serious gaming tool. It looks to have created problems in the development process rather than having solved any great flaw in the current and well proven method of controlling an FPS game.

 

Check out the video below for a demonstration of Move-controlled Killzone 3.