E3 2011: EA refining Kinect for FIFA 13

EA has said Kinect support won’t be added to FIFA until FIFA 13 at the earliest.

The company has been working on incorporating the motion sensor into the game for some time.

Now the publisher has assured Eurogamer at E3 that it doesn’t wish to tack on Kinect support.

What we’ve learnt over the years is building anything on a platform just for the sake of it doesn’t make any sense,” said EA Sports’ senior vice president of worldwide development Andrew Wilson.

So, the question is, how can that platform add value?”

This comes after EA Sports president Peter Moore announced at Microsoft’s E3 press conference this week that four series were set to receive Kinect support: FIFA, Madden NFL and Tiger Woods PGA Tour, plus a mystery title.

Moore has expressed some misgivings about motion control, Wilson explained.

I’m not sure Peter was down on motion control,” he said.

Peter has always been open to any experience that makes sense. In my conversations with him he’s certainly not doubtful or down on it. He just asks questions like the rest of us do, like, what’s the right experience?

We’re going to work through the next year as we get to the following year – it’s not for FIFA 12, it’s for FIFA 13 – and ask, what’s the right experience for Kinect? How does Kinect add value to you as a gamer who plays FIFA across platforms?”

Wilson did not say if EA plans to integrate Kinect into the traditional version of FIFA or create a Kinect-only version instead.

This [Kinect] is going to play a part in who you are in FIFA. To the level that that actually ends up integrated? We don’t know yet. But we’ve got some pre-production ideas we think are kinda cool.

We know there are gamers out there who have Kinect. They’re saying, ‘how do we, for the time we play on our Kinect, add value to our bigger world as FIFA? You tell us we can do it on our phone. You tell us we can do it on Facebook. We want to do it on Kinect as well’.

We’re going to go about solving that problem.”