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Skyrim Is Getting Kinect Support, Dragon Shouts Included

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.'"

19 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Fix bugs first by kwark · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Instead of adding new stuff, please fix the bugs first.

    1. Re:Fix bugs first by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 5, Funny

      They were gonna, but then they took an arrow to the knee...

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    2. Re:Fix bugs first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Christ don't be such a fucking wet blanket. The capacity of some people to bitch when a cool game company adds really cool new features post launch FOR FREE is fucking astounding.

      Elder scrolls games are going to have bugs. Lots of them. The size and the scope of the project makes this inevitable. The trick is to kill the real nasty showstoppers and IMO they did a great job with Skyrim. No, more importantly the goal is to make sure the game is FUN.

      Ex - Giants launching you in to the sky. Is it a bug? Yes! Is it fun? Oh fuck yes it is! It's a fucking riot! It went viral before the game's official launch and probably did more to sell the game than most features they spent a lot of time and money actually developing! It's not worth fixing, and it really doesn't do much to the gameplay. Why? Because its a bug in the execution animation. You'd never see a launch if you weren't going to end up dead anyway.

      Another example would be the buckets over the head of shop keepers. Hilarious and unintended, but an amazing advertisement of the game's capabilities. It showed the game had extremely fine grained collision detection and a physics model that respected it. It also showed how the NPCs had real vision based what they could actually "see".

      So take your bug fixes and stuff it. Furthermore, if you purchased the game on the "right" platform (PC) you'd know that elder scrolls games have a life years beyond their launch date due to excelent community created content.

    3. Re:Fix bugs first by vic.tz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I've heard this line before, and it makes a lot of sense as a player. But as a developer, I know that I have a LOT more fun working on new content and features than hunting down and fixing bugs. When I'm working on new content, it's more fun, my progress feels more traceable, I feel more productive, and the result is a new shiny feature. Conversely, when I'm hunting down bugs, it can be tedious, aggravating work, and even when I fix the bug, all of my headaches can be attributed to some stupid error or design flaw made many, many months ago. Essentially, it's easier and more rewarding for me to add features vs fix bugs.

      I know this sounds superficial and/or unprofessional, but it no doubt affects how I work. Granted, the projects I work on are much smaller than Skyrim, so it's hard to compare to the mindset of a multimillion dollar project.

    4. Re:Fix bugs first by kwark · · Score: 2

      I'm more concerned about being stuck with stuff I can't drop (at last there was a bugfix to make these weigh 0), stuff that doesn't trigger the necessary quest triggers to continue, unobtainable trophies due to missing triggers. But as you can read I didn't buy the blessed version of the game.

      -Arena, didn't enjoy it, wasn't into the genre back then.
      -Daggerfall was even more buggy than Skyrim, lost interest.
      -Morrowind (xbox) was playable. Only troubles I experience were near Vicec and during flied.
      -Oblivion (ps3), can't remember problems, not special in anyway.
      -Fallout 3 (ps3) was enjoyable, minor bugs but only because I waited till the end of the release cycle (buying the game of the year edition).
      -Fallout N.V. (ps3) lots of fun, waited 1 year after release before buying but still some reproducable bugs in main quest lines (reset/reload and pray the quest will not crash next time).
      -Skyrim (ps3), couldn't resist buying it a couple of weeks after release, less buggy then I feared. Looks incredible and overal gameplay is great. It's frustrating having to resort to wikis like http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/ to circumvent bugs.

    5. Re:Fix bugs first by lymond01 · · Score: 2

      I played all the way through Skyrim on the PC -- dragon quest, companions quest, dark brotherhood, civil war, etc etc. Not one bug. Never crashed, never ran into anything strange.

      You, my friend, seem to hunt for problems. Instead of telling everyone AFTER the game is released, you'd probably make a great beta tester. And yes, even though this is the internet, I'm serious.

  2. Oooh voice commands by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Depending on what gets voice commands, you can have a lot of fun by walking up to someone playing this with a Kinect.

    "Hi Bob, looks like that giant is geting a bit close... EQUIP FEEBLE DAGGER."

    1. Re:Oooh voice commands by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, it can't get much worse than the existing UI in any case.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    2. Re:Oooh voice commands by StikyPad · · Score: 4, Funny

      From my experience of Kinect's voice recognition, it would go something like this:

      You: XBOX EQUIP FEEBLE DAGGER! XBOX EQUIP FEEBLE DAGGER! EQUIP...
      Friend: [Punch to the face.]
      You: OW!!!
      XBox: Are you sure you want to save?

  3. What happens when... by getSalled · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... I yell "LeRoy Jenkins!" ??

    1. Re:What happens when... by jjp9999 · · Score: 2

      Oh, I wish I had mod points left for this. They should program it as a command that makes you swing your sword wildly while running in whatever direction you're facing.

  4. Re:Why not PC? by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 2

    Except that the kinect is what is doing the voice recognition. It's not just being used as mic input.

  5. Re:Why not PC? by schitso · · Score: 5, Informative

    You mean like this?
    http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5626

    These kinds of mods are exactly why I prefer PC gaming.

  6. Re:Why not PC? by jjp9999 · · Score: 2

    There's a mod for PC that does this. One of the guys mentioned this in the comments on TechZwn - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofC3TW30fGQ&feature=player_embedded#!

  7. Re:Why is a Kinect needed for this? (On PC) by Verunks · · Score: 2

    because they are using the kinect api to do voice recognition they didn't write their own

  8. Re:Why X360 and Kinect exclusive? by Mike+Mentalist · · Score: 3, Informative

    PC gamers already can FUS-RO-DAH in Skyrim with this mod - http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5626

    Enough with the conspiracy theories. Your paranoid sense of persecution is unwarranted.

    --
    I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
  9. Re:Exclusive to xbox? feh! by The+Dancing+Panda · · Score: 3, Informative

    Did you bother to read any other comments? They're using the Kinect API to do voice commands, they didn't roll their own voice recognition (as that is much more difficult). Furthermore, there is apparently a mod that allows you to do this on the PC. Not everything is some terrible thing Microsoft did to fuck you over.

  10. Re:Why X360 and Kinect exclusive? by KitFox · · Score: 2

    PC gamers aren't upset about the lack of voice control. We've had that forever by comparison.

    What we ARE upset about is:

    "...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."

    --

    @Whee

  11. Re:Why X360 and Kinect exclusive? by KitFox · · Score: 2, 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.

    --

    @Whee