Project Natal Release Date & Hardware Update
Written by Ender on January 10, 2010 · Filed under Games
Microsoft announced at CES this year, that Project Natal has a release date of ‘Holiday 2010’. There’s been no official release date, but at least we know that it’ll be high on some Xbox 360 gamers Christmas list in 2010.
Along with the announcement of the Project Natal release date, it’s also been confirmed that Microsoft are to drop a hardware chip from Natal’s motion control system to save themselves some money. The hardware chip was going to be the processing power for Natal, but this has now been dropped and a software solution has been set in place.
This isn’t bad news or a sign that Natal is already struggling. The software solution to the chip should make it easier to update the system a lot quicker than hardware and will also keep the costs down of Natal on its release and so we’ll still be able to bag it for around the £50 mark.
Because Natal will now run on the Xbox 360’s processors, people might think that this will take a lot of the processors power to run and will affect the games. Well apparently this isn’t the case as a lot of the Xbox 360’s games don’t use 100% of the processing power anyway. This perhaps also just goes to show how powerful the current Xbox 360 is which could well mean that there’s still many more years of life in it, so Microsoft aren’t looking to replace their successful Xbox 360 any time soon.
So could this mean that AAA titles won’t be heading for Natal? Well no, because certain parts of Fable III are meant to be used with Natal, perhaps in a similar way to the Project Natal “Milo” artificial intelligence that Peter Molyneux showed off. It’s going to be interesting to see if bigger games such as Fable III will struggle to run properly whilst you’re using Natal at the same time.
I’m looking forward to Natal’s release as from the videos I’ve seen of it, it looks like great fun. But I think I’m going to read a lot of game reviews nearer the time of its release to see if the exclusion on the chip will have any effect on how Natal plays.
What are your views on this news? Are you still going to be pre-ordering Project Natal or are you now a bit sceptical after reading this? Let us know in the comments below.
UPDATE: Amazon have now got Project Natal (Xbox 360) listed on their site, you can’t buy or even pre-order it yet, there isn’t even any release date or pricing information on the page, but you can sign up to be alerted by email or text message when this is available!
Via – Eurogamer
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