Red Steel 2 was released exclusively for the Wii in May this year. The game received favourable reviews, earning an overall Metacritic score of 80%, but ran into serious problems when it came down to sales, only selling 270 000 copies.

We attended a very entertaining talk given by Jason VandenBerghe, Creative Director for Red Steel 2, at GDC Europe 2010 yesterday. The discussion, titled ‘Chilling tales from Red Steel 2: How Motion Control will or won’t change the future,’ took the audience on a journey through the problems the development team faced when incorporating Motion Control into the game and ended with VandenBerghe’s predictions for the future of Motion Control.

Getting off the couch is never easy

The talk centered on two main themes, the first being that the average person finds it much harder to learn how to move in a new way than to learn how to apply motions they already know how to do. The second point was that the number of people who like to stand up and exert themselves physically for fun is very small.

VandenBerghe then took a brief look at what Motion Control is, starting with Binary Input, which he compared to drag racing, before moving on to Analogue Input, F-1 racing, and finally Motion Control, ‘Baha buggy racing.’ Although this may sound somewhat confusing, it’s actually a descriptive way to think about the different control methods of gaming.

Let’s break it down further to explain it a little more. Binary Input has two possible inputs while Analogue has many possible inputs. Motion Control input on the other hand effectively has an infinite number of inputs with regards to position, orientation, momentum and inertia and, perhaps most importantly, there are no constraints on the player, but it takes them more time to learn a physical movement.

To solve this problem the developers must now teach players how to play the game. To do this VandenBerghe revealed how the team cleverly tucked tutorials inside the levels, teaching the core ideas to players through lessons. But they soon discovered that players needed more detail and when this also failed Ubisoft went on the road to see how people were playing the game.

The Waggler versus the Samurai

What the developer discovered was that there are many different types of Red Steel 2 players. These were very aptly demonstrated by VandenBerghe (and a rather threatening walking stick): The Waggler, Dartangnan, Conan, Samurai, Mad Mardigan, Charlie’s Angel and Piledriver. The main epiphany was that people needed to be taught, hence the on-screen Wii-girl model was introduced with great success. This on-screen model isolated the player from stress, broke the motion into micro-steps and required the player to repeat the action a number of times because physical skills take time to develop.

Turning back to the sales problem now, it may surprise you to know that Red Steel 2’s rather disappointing sales didn’t come as a surprise to Ubisoft. To illustrate this point VandenBerghe pointed out that the target market of a multiplatform game is basically divided between two groups: everyone and those who are interested in the game. A single platform game, on the other hand, is limited further because there are only a certain number of people who own the console. This is then even further limited when a game requires a peripheral to be played because it reduces the number of people who can buy the game even further.

However, VandenBerghe believes this is not such a significant restraint because Wii Sports Resort, which also requires the Wii MotionPlus accessory, still managed to sell 16 747 716 units worldwide.

So why then did Red Steel 2 not achieve the same success? Before we answer this question let’s take a look at the pros and cons VandenBerghe believes the game had in its favour and working against it. Chief among the pros were the enthusiastic fans, the support of both Nintendo and Ubisoft, and the large Wii MotionPlus install base. On the other hand there were a number of things that threatened the game’s success. Things such as the fact that it was a single platform game, one that required a peripheral, it missed the popular Christmas period release window, and lastly the belief that the audience and the Wii platform were a mismatch because the majority of so-called hardcore fans were Xbox 360 or PS3 owners.

VandenBerghe believes there was also a hidden constraint that Ubisoft did not count on, and that is audience willingness. After all how many gamers are willing to get off the couch and move? He estimates that it is no more than 20% and that the market for games that require you to stand up and play is in general very small. He cautions that you should be careful if your game uses Motion Control as its core input, is single platform and requires the player to get up.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, with VandenBerghe ending his interactive talk with his belief that this problem will be solved if Motion Control peripherals come standard in the box with each console for the next generation. He also encouraged developers to persevere with having their Motion Control games shipped as multiplatform ones because the market will want the option to play the game on their console of choice.

So, if we return to the title of the talk, VandenBerghe believes that Motion Control will change the future because new genres, like the First-person brawler of Red Steel 2, will become possible and because designers will become teachers through necessity. The flip side of the coin shows that Motion Control won’t change the future because many genres will remain unchanged (like real-time strategy titles), players will still be uninterested in exerting themselves, and, most importantly, it won’t change the future if peripherals remain add-ons because the Motion Control market will remain niche.