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A Breakdown Of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier's Kinect Controls
As another example of Microsoft's push to incorporate Kinect controls into hardcore games, Ubisoft showed off Ghost Recon: Future Soldier's Kinect support, which goes above and beyond simple menu navigation.
In a live demo at Microsoft's press conference, an Ubisoft rep showed off Kinect support for Future Soldier, which includes both voice and gesture controls. The first example was navigating the impressively deep customization options for guns. By swiping his hand back and forth, players can scroll through available weapons. After choosing one, you can rotate the gun in three dimensional space by moving your hands in front of you. The most impressive moment was when the rep moved his hands apart, causing all of the components of the gun to disassemble and hang in space. You can then select individual parts (there looked to be about a dozen components in each gun), swapping them in and out at will. The whole demo looked like a scene out of Minority Report, and if it works as well as it did during the demo, it should be relatively simple to customize your weapons quickly.
In the event that your arms get tired, you can also use voice commands to tweak your guns as well, by saying simple menu commands ("Next," "Select," etc.). While this functionality didn't seem very helpful, you can also switch to custom loadouts by saying commands like, "optimize for close combat." When the rep gave this simple command, the gun instantly rearranged itself into a completely different weapon. Ubisoft says the number of custom gun combinations will range in the millions.
Finally, Ubisoft showed off actual Kinect controls for gameplay. It's unclear if this is just to test fire your custom weapons or if you'll be able to play the entire game using motion controls, but the rep managed to competently aim the gun by hunching down and moving his right hand (as if he was holding the barrel), and then opening and closing his left hand to fire. I can't imagine many players will use this functionality in place of a controller, but it worked better than I would have guessed.
At the end of the demo, Ubisoft announced that all future Tom Clancy titles will utilize Kinect support in some form or another, another sign that Microsoft has bigger plans for the motion camera beyond casual Avatar games.
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