Kinect will help widen Mass Effect 3's audience, says EA

EA Games boss Frank Gibeau has said the reason Kinect functionality is coming to Mass Effect 3 is to make the game less intimidating to the general public.

Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer, Gibeau said adding Kinect to the game will help "grow the audience and make it more accessible."

"Mass Effect has a fairly complicated combat system," he explained. "You've got story and choice. For some fans that don't buy 12 games a year and maybe buy two or three, some of those things can be intimidating. We wanted to open up the accessibility without hurting the depth or the quality. Kinect is a fantastic technology that allows us to do that."

The addition of Kinect makes Mass Effect 3 "much easier to play" as you voice commands and read dialog during moments of "frenetic" gameplay.

"For core gamers, they just liked the fact they could even be more powerful with it," he said. "With new gamers they felt they could get into it much easier."

But it's not just all about fun either, admitted Gibeau, who said that thank to the rise in development costs, publishers need to start widening the "possible audience," or else company's cannot maintain a "sustainable business if you're in the million unit seller range."

"You've got to be multi-million units," he said. "You have to think about not just the core gamers but the hit buyers and the more casual buyers; having a design and a story and an interface that works across all of those segments without losing the core. It makes life interesting.

"We think it about it as the core and more. Not more, leave the core. That's a recipe for failure. You have to be smart about it. You can't dumb the game down. But at the same time you have to make it so a lot more people can play it than just core gamers."

Mass Effect 3 is out March 6 on PC,  PS3,  and Xbox 360.