Blizzard's Pardo: Natal may struggle with "spatial recognition"

Blizzard design boss Rob Pardo's claimed Microsoft motion-sensing unit Project Natal might not be the wonder-box the 360-maker would have us believe.

"I've got to play with Natal a little bit, and it seems like the difficulty with it is still spatial recognition with moving your hands and doing things," said the exec, speaking at a StarCraft II single-player event in California last month.

Pardo went on to say that recent ideas for Natal-based strategy games lofted by Ubisoft's Michael de Plater may not be possible thanks to the system's "imprecise" nature.

"You'd actually still need an interface that you could do that with, and Natal is still going to be pretty imprecise in the way Wii is today," he said.

"I mean, I could see the future one day [allowing it], but I don't know if Natal's it. Maybe it's a step towards it."

It's worth noting this is the first time Pardo had ever thought about Natal in this sense before.

"I've thought about it for all of five seconds right now, so there could be some genius there that I don't immediately see," he added.

Natal's expected to release in late 2010.

Content from the event: impressions here, Rob Pardo interview here, Campaign screens here.