Kinect and FIFA...

Ok, so for the 360 FIFA players this may or may not interest you but Kinect will be used for FIFA in FIFA 13. I think it's safe to say I've never been a fan of using Kinect in FIFA as I'm more of an old school gamer, I do have Kinect and I use it for some things but generally for me FIFA is there for me to relax and play, not jog on the spot and pretend to play football.

It's that age old argument, why would I want to play FIFA by running around, swinging my leg, jumping etc? I can do that by joining a Sunday league team and actually playing football, for me FIFA is that ability to sit down and enjoy something I love, football.

So if you head over to FIFASoccerBlog and check out the article written by Tom Mills called Kinect Support for FIFA 13, you'll see that he has highlighted some ideas of what he's seen suggested about Kinect being used in FIFA. There are a lot of ideas including taking throw ins/ playing the actual game, playing as a keeper, minigames, menu navigation, voice support and the one I'm interested in, gameface.

Kinect and gameface

Now I'm sure anyone who knows me knows I am a very big fan of the gameface technology and I love to play as myself in FIFA so to me the Kinects best contribution it could make is via gameface.

I'm not sure who reads this blog and what they will know about FIFA and how it's made so if I offend you by talking to you like a simpleton it's not because I'm trying to be patronising but more because I want every one to understand what I'm getting at. At the moment EA are heavily investing in a fantastic bit of software called 8 way facial technology where they capture a face of a professional footballer with 8 different cameras and then build the face up out of these images (see, simpleton). You can see the technology in the video below:

I don't see why the Kinect can't use a similar kind of process to make a gameface. I think essentially the Kinect is a good enough technology to actually tell the actual shape of your face due to it's ability to interpret 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light. If it can do this then I'm sure EA could write a program to use this technology to scan your face and turn it into a gameface. I think the potential for this is huge and being as the Kinect can tell the shape of your face and facial features it should be able to avoid misshaping the face as the current gameface technology does. It would also stop a lot of issues with people not being able to get gameface to work on their PC.

At this point I have to say I'm not sure what else I would want Kinect to do because for everything positive I think of I find more negatives. An example would be custom celebrations would be great fun but if allowed to be used online I'm sure their would be many people making wanker gestures and so on causing a lot of younger players to maybe miss out due to their parents stopping them playing etc

I don't like the idea of gimmicks such as playing as a keeper or taking throw in's or set pieces so the only other thing I can see working would be mini games and I have to be honest, I'd rather EA didn't waste the disc space.

One thing I would quite like would to be able to use the voice function to record myself singing a chant and then for EA to have an option to add echo, reverb and duplication to create crowd chants. Now this may sound like a bad idea to some but it depends what you like, the idea of being able to make custom chants for my VP such as:

"Spike Chapman, Spike Chapman, running down the wing,

Spike Chapman, Spike Chapman, it's his name we sing,

Big, fat and bald, 

starting to get old,

Spike Chapman, Spike Chapman!"

and then modify myself singing that to sound like an entire crowd chanting it would be great fun and would add to that realism of you actually being in the game.

I suppose my point is, if EA are going to add Kinect then they need to add functionality that we want, not gimmicky crap that the average user won't use again after using it a few times.

It'll be interesting this time next year to see what EA's plans are with Kinect and whilst I have high hopes I can't help but worry that FIFA 13 may be tainted for the more dedicated fans as EA reach out to more casual gamers with gimmicky Kinect features, I guess only time will tell.