Skyrim Is Getting Kinect Support, Dragon Shouts Included 95
jjp9999 writes "Bethesda announced they're bringing Kinect support to Skyrim. It doesn't sound like this will include motion detection. Rather, it will be around voice commands — tons of voice commands. It supports dragon shouts, trading, navigation, switching weapons, and a whole lot of other features that usually require you to assign hotkeys or to sort through menus. They also gave a brief hint at new content, stating they've 'been hard at work on creating the first set of game add-ons that will be exclusive to the Xbox 360. This additional content will add new quests, locations, features, and much more to the world of Skyrim.'"
Re:Why X360 and Kinect exclusive? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll hit both sides in this case.
The first consideration is that PC Gamers, who already spend a ton of money on the gaming rigs and have a lot more capability than any console's half-decade-old tech, feel now like the game manufacturer is treating them like second-class citizens. PC games that have Console-optimized content, focus on the console development over PC development, generally a perceived lack of respect for the PC gaming population. Literally to the point where, in this case, development of mods for the PC is not only effectively almost Open Source, but Bethesda isn't even making any official mods except HD packs that don't look as good as the third party ones.
It's to the point where the people who spend the most money on their hardware have the least support. Then the fact that the game is throttled to work best on what is effectively nearly ancient technology these days, their super-hardware does them little good. Try using a 1x3 surround-screen setup and you'll quickly discover that the menus and UI are sized based on the width of the screen without accounting for the height. Unusable. Skyrim could have been a beautiful experience for the high-powered gamer, but it isn't unless the gamers themselves fix it. Fixing it is often a battle against the official developers also, as official patches that fix a handful of things also break dozens of third-party fixes.
Now that it's to the point where PC gamers are feeling like they're being told "Sorry, your gaming experience can be far too much better than those peoples'. We need to give you a handicap.", we're getting less and less pleased. Here's a comparison: What would you do if Amazon.com said "We're giving out cool stuff to people who buy things from us! But... We decided not to give it to anybody who lists a book on our system. Sorry, Michael, you've got all the benefits of publishing a book, so you can't have this stuff." I would expect you to potentially feel slighted. All in all, it's human nature to not want to be considered an afterthought, unsupported, inferior market segment, etc. People buy high end PCs to have a better gaming experience than the people who spend a quarter as much on a console. They don't expect to be tossed the scraps and told to fend for themselves by the game developers just because they have better hardware.
On the other side of the coin, there are many times more users buying it for the consoles. It's just a "business decision" to make the important stuff for the bigger market. One can also consider that the "additional content" probably has a strong propensity for carrying a cost, so the highest revenue will come from the larger market segment. Money speaks, after all.