"You're right -- it probably could be done physically on a controller if you tried. But that would totally throw off the game balance, difficulty?all that stuff. And it's not just difficulty and game balance in that sense, but it's also because all of the game decisions and level designs have been made from the ground up to be able to be enjoyed on Kinect. We have no idea if would be fun if you played on a controller -- we couldn't make any guarantees there. I'm sure really dedicated Panzer fans want to play on a controller, so I understand that feeling, but if I were to make a controller game it probably wouldn't be this game."
Taking that a step further, he explained that certain features like the camera work in the game, have been designed for Kinect in a way that would make less sense if you played on a controller. "Like for example, in the Panzer Dragoon series if you pressed the left or right trigger buttons, you could face anywhere you wanted," he said. "We cut that feature specifically because it doesn't work on Kinect."
"Also, because of the control scheme paradigm shift, it's obvious that how we handle the twitch skills of a shooter, and the difficulty that comes from that, is different because the controls are completely different," he continued. "So in order to mitigate that, we decided to add in an RPG/dragon raising layer to make the game scalable in difficulty without having to rely on controller twitch."
To be fair, comparing Project Draco to Child of Eden is complicated, because Draco will be a moderately-priced Xbox Live Arcade game whereas Child of Eden was a full-priced retail release, so Grounding -- which currently consists of around 15 people -- doesn't necessarily have the same budget and resources that Q Entertainment did.
To finish our conversation on the topic, I asked Futatsugi if he could, it he would want to make Draco using the Panzer Dragoon license (which Sega still owns). "Not really," he replied, "I guess because all the things that I wanted to do with Panzer I did already. So I'm not really fixated on that game so much anymore. If for example, I was tasked with a different job of making a Panzer Dragoon sequel, then I probably wouldn't even do it on Kinect. So that I would enjoy doing on its own, but it's a different thing."
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