Why Fable: The Journey has no melee combat

[Albion's Sparrow]

Personally, I don't think including swords/guns would've made the game bad in any way. The point of the Kinect is to simulate the feeling of actually doing something, right? You are the controller, as they say.

And when Molyneux says "there's a physical encoding of what you think a sword should swing like" or whatever it was, how many of us have swung an actual sword, or shot a gun? Most of the time, we're just watching people do that, and not ourselves ... so why take it out?

Really, Fable's taking some risky turns, though not all of them are bad or anything.

 

[Shadowfiend]

Listen. You all just need to accept that wizardry is superior to weapons and guns in all ways. Forever. In space.

 

[Zenmonkeh]

Peter Molyneux is really Lionhead's worst enemy... if did not promise or explain things all the time, maybe his fanbase wouldn't be so disappointed in his games.

 

[Warpedhero]

We could have done melee weapons, but the one thing I hate about melee weapons, and guns as well, is that the human brain is encoded to expect recoil from those things.​

If Molyneux was talking about recoil as in shockwaves, he's already contradicted himself. In every Fable game before The Journey, when a player cast a spell, there were varying levels of shockwaves in the controller, so to say that only melee/ranged weapons require shockwaves to "feel real" is false.

If you think about it, the missing recoil is the main problem with a game specifically designed for the Kinect.
With a controller, you feel the shockwaves when you swing a sword, cast a spell, or fire a gun; using body movement, you only feel yourself swinging the weapon, not actually hitting anything. In that sense, I agree with Molyneux that it would not be very immersive, but the answer is not completely removing melee, it's creating a hybrid game that uses both the Kinect and the shockwave controller.

Look at Skyrim. If you have a Kinect, you can use voice commands to shout, but still use your controller to swing your melee weapon.

I think Lionhead wanted to be among the first to create an adventure game specifically for the Kinect, and that's why they removed melee weapons in The Journey.

[WARNING: Original Idea]:
Now that I think about it, the best thing to do for the Kinect is to develop some sort of gloves with shockwave technology in them. They could have built-in sensors to detect when a weapon made contact with an enemy/object, and the console could be updated to send signals to the gloves that would trigger shockwaves. Just a thought.

 

[Dark Drakan]

I have had Kinect for my 360 and my Xbox One but rarely actually use the gestures in game unless they are merely hand gestures. The voice control and commands are much more useful than any of the gesture controls.