Early concepts to control portions of Fable III with Microsoft's Kinect sensor just weren't good enough to bring to gamers, a representative for the game told Kotaku this week. Agreed. The tomato idea doesn't sound awesome.
At a Microsoft product showcase in New York on Monday, I learned that two Kinect-oriented ideas that had been tried for Fable III involved making statues and throwing tomatoes at people.The Fable representative briefly mentioned both cut features while demoing interesting content that actually is in the game.
Statue-making and tomato-tossing both sounded like minor gimmicks, diversions from the traditionally meaty Fable series quests. One can imagine how they might have worked, though neither was described to me. Perhaps you would pose in front of the Kinect sensor to make a statue. Perhaps you would hurl imaginary tomatoes against people you disliked. Neither mode sounded like the kind of revolutionary experiences that Microsoft wants gamers to feel when they use the November-launching Kinect.
In August, Peter Molyneux, head of Lionhead Studios and the chief visionary behind the Fable series, told website Engadget that Fable's planned Kinect support would not be available at launch.
"I think something like Fable would be a fantastic experience with Kinect, but here is the thing," Molyneux said during a video interview with Engadget, " Kinect is so different to any other device that is out there — because it makes us designers have to go back to the drawing board — to make the experience that Fable can give Kinect and Kinect can give Fable is going to take a little bit of time....It takes us time to craft that experience is really really cool."
It's still unclear if Fable III will ever have Kinect support added after the game's October 26 release. With ideas like the ones we heard about this week, getting that support late or not at all don't seem like bad options. The last thing Fable III or Kinect need is a mini-game so poor that you're tossing tomatoes at it.