ME3 Kinect targets casual gamers

Publisher EA says it added Kinect compatibility to Mass Effect 3 in order to target the large casual gamer demographic.

That’s according to EA Games label president Frank Gibeau, who told Eurogamer he wants Mass Effect 3 to grow the audience and make it more accessible”.

He said: We wanted to open up the accessibility without hurting the depth or the quality. Kinect is a fantastic technology that allows us to do that.

Mass Effect has a fairly complicated combat system. You’ve got story and choice. For some fans that don’t buy 12 games a year and maybe buy two or three, some of those things can be intimidating.”

His comments come following the Mass Effect 3 stage demo during Microsoft’s E3 conference last week. Gamers will be able to command their squad members in the game using Xbox 360 Kinect’s voice recognition functionality.

When you’re in this business now you have to be able to get to the widest possible audience,” Gibeau added. Games are so expensive to build now that you can’t have a sustainable business if you’re in the million unit seller range. You’ve got to be multi-million units.

You have to think about not just the core gamers but the hit buyers and the more casual buyers – having a design and a story and an interface that works across all of those segments without losing the core. It makes life interesting.

We think it about it as the core and more. Not more, leave the core. That’s a recipe for failure. You have to be smart about it. You can’t dumb the game down. But at the same time you have to make it so a lot more people can play it than just core gamers.”

Mass Effect 3 will be released on March 6th, 2012. The game is in development at BioWare.