Mirror's Edge Hands On & Interview

At the GCA event in Singapore this year, I was lucky enough to check out Mirror’s Edge, the forthcoming first person action/adventure (not a shooter!) from DICE, the makers of the Battlefield games. I also got to interview Tom Farrer, a producer on the game, who kindly showed me how not to fall to my death every time I tried to jump from building to building.

The game has several key things going for it. The graphics are refreshingly bright, and turn what could have been a stark and uninteresting urban landscape into something that is very aesthetically pleasing (“We’re so fed up with games that were brown!” said Tom). Colour is put to good use – the basic environment is depicted in shades of blue, while objects you can interact with (such as particular walls, ramps, and pipes) are shaded in reds and oranges. It helps make things extremely clear at a glance, while actually adding to the graphical style.

The core gameplay is the other strong feature on display. The first person perspective immediately makes this game different from anything else out there. Instead of running around gunning people down, you’ll be performing all sorts of acrobatic moves, something that is almost always done in the third person. The perspective shift can’t be understated.

The controls themselves are also nice and simple, for the most part – the left trigger buttons dictate whether you will perform a high or low move, and you’ll perform different actions depending on where you are. If you approach a ramp and press the high button, for example, you’ll leap up into the air. And as you’re about to hit the ground, you can hit the low button to turn an otherwise painful landing into a smooth roll, keeping your momentum intact.

So how does it play? Well I died a lot, always by mistiming my jumps. But once you get past the initial learning curve, it does become easy to look (and feel) really cool. I didn’t get to try out combat, but the parkour/free running stuff looks like it’s been pretty comprehensively brought across.

Here’s part of my chat with producer Tom Farrer, which took place with a lot of noise around us, and was frequently punctuated by swearing as I fell to my death.

So how long has the game been in development?

Well it’s been in proper development for 18 months to two years, but I guess the concept came around three years ago.

How does the gameplay advance and escalate as the game progresses?

Well the gameplay is broken down into four parts – you’ve got parkour-like exploratory spaces, there are puzzle areas, chase sequences, and combat elements. So all of those pieces get more challenging, but the environments also change, which affect all the aspects of the games.

You’ve probably been asked this a lot, but did you try a third person perspective at all?

No it was first person all the way baby! There was no point – there are plenty of third person games out there…how would you make it feel different? We were obsessed with actually being there, that feeling of jumping through the environment. We wanted to really show you the possibility of space! [Laughs]

How hard was it developing the camera system?

Hard! I get simulation sickness myself quite badly – it’s been a learning curve getting it right. It’s gone through millions of iterations.

The hardest thing was just the running and walking. That took bloody ages! Because no one really knows what it’s like to jump between buildings, you know? So we were making things up for quite a while there.

We tried a lot of different things with the camera – the main character has quite a complicated rig, with a neck and spine, and we started working quite a lot with her shoulders, and how you might feel her shoulders move through the first person camera. It didn’t work. It just made you barf! It looked really cool, but when you started to turn, it felt really wrong.

So we’ve been tweaking and tweaking for months. And we ended up remaking almost every animation by the end – everything we thought looked cool while playing was actually bad!



Tell us about the controls.

We’re using most of the buttons, but the main controls are very simple. We wanted people to really nail the speed and momentum, and not have a complex interface get in the way of the running and jumping.

So how did the game concept come about in the first place?

Well we knew that we wanted to make a new IP – not another Battlefield. We wanted more strings to our bow!

We knew we wanted to work in first person, and do something urban, with a lot of chasing.

But when we were prototyping this game, it was really annoying, because all the objects on the rooftops kept getting in the way. And it really exposed just how terrible first person controls really were – it was like, “Oh no, it’s a small hedge, I cannot get over it!”

So we started really looking at the physical movement and how it worked – we wanted to emphasise the ‘person’ in first person.

I can think of games like Chronicles of Riddick, and Breakdown from Namco, that did a bit more than normal with first person controls. And Jumping Flash as well – it’s a first person game where you were some weird little rabbit thing on the PlayStation. But for the most part it was all new to us.

So is it almost done?

It is almost finished! It comes out November 11th.

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