Killer Instinct's Kinect player-scanning built with tournament play in mind

Killer Instinct publisher Microsoft has explained how the brawler works with Xbox One's new Kinect sensor. The studio believes it will make for slicker tournament play.

Speaking with IGN at the Evo 2013 fighting tournament last weekend, Microsoft Studios creative director Adam Isgreen explained that whenever a player sits down in front of their Kinect while playing Killer Instinct, the device will recognise that person's face and scan in all of their user settings in a flash.

He said, "We want to have features to set up tournaments with your friends. Say there are eight of you and you just start sitting down. I know a lot of people are like, ah, the Kinect camera in the room, I'm scared!

"But the coolness of being able to sit down, the controller pairs itself to you when you pick it up. It knows your buttons. It knows how you like to play. It knows what characters you want to play. You can just say Start, and go. It knows who you are in the tournament bracket, so it will just automatically do the matches correctly."

Isgreen added, "If you have a character you love, it might primary select that character already. Your buttons are already configured based on you picking up that controller. It knows it's you, so it can do the leaderboards correctly. All that's possible on Xbox One - mid-fight, too. So, here, you play, you give me your controller, it reconfigures it to me.

What do you think of Kinect's player-scanning tech? Will it make game tournaments slicker to set up, or does the idea still creep you out?

Either way, Isgreen believes the features will help push Killer Instinct's position as a tournament fighter. "There are a lot of neat features we can start to do that you can't do right now," he concluded.

"We can't do that without having those kind of things built into the box. That's one of the reasons we've kept them in. There is a lot of really cool stuff coming for it. Those are the kind of features we want to uphold for tournaments, online or offline. It's going to be a big push for us."

Thanks Eurogamer.