Portal 2 Won’t Be Getting Move Support After All, Mistranslation to Blame

After an apparent confirmation that Portal 2 would feature PlayStation Move support, Valve’s Chet Faliszek has re-confirmed to Eurogamer that it in fact, will not.

The problem, it seems, is that Faliszek spoke to the German PlayStation Blog where the translation from English to German wasn’t that sound. In fact it was the complete opposite of what Faliszek said.

“Their translation from me to them [was in error], they may have not spoken that well,” Faliszek said. “I don’t speak that well of English to begin with! Who knows!” When questioned why it won’t feature Move support, Faliszek said: “I’m not sure it would make the game better. Obviously there are a bunch of games the Kinect and the Move absolutely made better and are for. But for this, where we had started from day one not thinking about that, it would not.”

That doesn’t mean that a version of the game won’t feature some sort of motion control, however. The game features the Hydra controller, a motion controller on the PC. Faliszek said that “those [Hydra] guys actually sit in our office. They’ve been working in our office for nine months, a year. So it’s not something we’d trivialise and say, ‘oh well, let’s just toss this in, it doesn’t need any thought or anything special.’ They’ve been working in that way for that. We think it deserves that kind of respect if we’re going to do it.”

“The Hydra stuff, those guys have invented new puzzles to make their thing make sense. They’ve done the work to make it fit in and not be just this light touch on the top,” he said.

While it’s a shame the game won’t feature Move support I totally agree with his argument. It’s better to have a more refined experience rather than one that’s arbitrarily latched on.