If you cast your mind back to last year, and how much I was impressed by Milo, the annoying CGI child that Microsoft and Lion Head showed off when Natal was announced, you may remember me being pretty excited about that particular game/piece of software.
Then if you look at the posts I had been doing months after that announcement. I said that Milo would in fact be pretty much impossible to make, because the world does not have the technology to make fully function organic Artificial Intelligence. If we did I would probably be sitting here right now next to my new Robot best friend drinking beer and planning to kill all humans. The fact of the matter is, how the hell could you make something so intelligent that it recognises every dialect of english and every accent english is spoken in. Plus how could you make something that would recognise every single human emotion, be it big or subtle. In this dayun age it’s quite frankly not possible. Or it’s just the fact MI5 have not told us yet and there is an underground base somewhere with Robots serving special agents tea.
Where am I going with all this blabber? Well I thought it was a bit weird that Microsoft in all their Kinect glory over this years Electronic Entertainments Expo, didn’t in fact show, mention or give us a glimpse of Milo. They didn’t even say, hey guys remember Milo from last year? Wasn’t he swell!
This all got me thinking. Was I right? Was it all just some flashy hoax with a woman in front of a widescreen telly carefully timing what she said to a video of a Computer Generated Small boy on a TV screen? Well yes and no. Yes because she was probably timing everything perfectly, and No because according to Microsoft and Lion head, this thing is still in development.
Now that's expert timing!
But here is the catch, After reading a little bit here and there across the internets. I actually found out from Kotaku.com. That Milo isn’t planned to head to retail. That yes, it is still in development but we are not planning to bring it to market.
Basically Lionheads big plan now is to perfect the “Milo Technology” and bring it to future game releases. So they want to integrate full on character interaction into games now? As opposed to having a single game where the aim is to sit down and interact with your new imaginary friend.
I have no idea why but this is again triggering off alarm bells in my head. But it might be something to do with the fact that this is stepping on stupidly dangerous territory. Take this from an RPG perspective, if Lionhead wanted to integrate it into say, Fable IV and have you as a character come up to someone in the street and fully interact with them, Not only would that take possibly five million more hours of game play just to get round one town and do the first quest. But you would be taking peoples lives away. Us humans have an addictive personality. I only say this because I once heard about a guy who has about 36 world of war craft accounts so he can go on quests by himself with a party of all of his characters, I could even go into the controversy that is Second Life and tell you about how that has swallowed about half of humanity and left a good portion of the human race dribbling and gawking into their PC screens as the virtual version of them selves gets all the handsome people and swims in a bath of money. But that would take at least a Novel and a Half to write, and I got to go to work in about half hour.
This Is How 1 Guy Plays 36 WoW Accounts....*Facepalm*
So to some up all this blabber I have been typing. It turns out that our old friend Milo will never be born and be brought to retail, He was just a tech demo at E3 last year and that’s how he is staying. Lionheads plan now is to integrate all this new “Milo Technology” into other games, and basically take over all the lives of us gamers out there. Take it from me, this idea is probably going to get too big for its boots.
Garv
