It's been an interesting week for Natal – firstly the system has been quietly downgraded from having an internal co-processor and memory to relying on the main 360 chipset, and secondly, developers have gone on record saying that the limitations of the device concern them.
I'm excited by Natal, but also increasingly concerned that the E3-winning concept shown last year is slightly ambitious compared to what is actually likely to be possible.
Traveller's Tales director Jon Burton was recently quoted in 'Develop' magazine as being worried about developing for the new control system "[the controller is] exceedingly clever, but the lag on the input and lack of physical buttons is really going to restrict the kind of games that can be done with it."
The comment on lag is interesting: When tracking one person Natal has a latency of 200ms... this is on top of around 100ms standard latency for a 30fps game. So 300ms between you doing something and the game responding.
That sounds manageable, but this lag also increases when the demands on the 360 are high (see the recent Half Life video for proof), or when the system is tracking more than one player. What is the performance like with 2 or more players? Tellingly all the demos so far have been single player experiences.
So the upshot of taking the custom hardware out of Natal is that it's cheaper for Microsoft to make and sell (which is a good thing in theory because more people can buy it)... but the downsides?
- No patching into older games as Natal reserves a slice of memory and CPU time.
- Variable performance based on system load.
- Natal is unlikely to be used for AAA cinematic blockbuster games due to system overhead.
Suddenly Microsoft's revolution in game control looks like it'll be, initially at least, most at home with mini-games and nifty interfaces – a paradigm shift away from how it was presented at E3.
Personally, I sincerely hope that some or all of these limitations are worked out in the months before launch... because the way the system was pitched to us at last year's E3 was intoxicating and exciting in equal measure. It would be shame if that was lost - it seems like a false economy to take the polish off of something so revolutionary in order to reduce the selling price.
I want Natal to be amazing – so I'll be crossing my fingers until E3. Will you?
