Gamers who aren’t so fond of motion control may have overlooked the high-flying dragon title, Lair, which came out last summer to an overwhelming amount of critical detestation, largely due to its controls. Lair relied almost solely on the motion sensing capabilities of the Sixaxis, which turned out to be a love it or hate it system for players. Factor 5 President, Julian Eggebrecht, recently spoke with IGN on Lair’s critical reception and the possibility of updated controls.
"Well, obviously we’ve got this huge gap there where basically if you read more casual comments — on Amazon, for example — to the overwhelming degree they are pretty positive. I think that everybody who got the controls actually enjoyed the game." said Eggebrecht.
"What’s disappointing to me is that almost every single person in and outside of the industry who is little bit more of a hardcore gamer had a huge problem with it, and we, quite frankly, didn’t anticipate that. I hope that a lot of people realize that underlying the problem they had with the base control, there actually was a really good game there. That’s at least what I think. Well, what else would I say?"
It’s here that Eggebrecht hints that differing control options could materialize in the future.
"If we find a chance in the future that would bring Lair to the audience which didn’t get any access, that would be fantastic," continued Eggebrecht.
"I can’t say anything quite yet, but there might be something in the works there. We might have a chance yet to bring those back to the table and hopefully, if that should happen, they would give the game a second chance. Nevertheless, we definitely took a long look at the results and learned a couple of lessons. If you’re on a platform where this whole motion control is something new and not being pitched as the main feature of the platform, you should probably give the choice between having different control schemes, there is absolutely no doubt about it."
We certainly agree with his last point; choice is always superior to lack of options. More on the possibility of updated controls for Lair soon.