Preview | Mirror's Edge

EA Rolls The Dice On Mirror’s Edge

July 11, 2008

EA-owned Digital Illusions (DICE) knows a thing or two about shooters. They’ve sold millions of copies of its Battlefield games over the years, including their most recent, Battlefield: Bad Company. Their next title, Mirror’s Edge, a first-person shooter, takes two bold chances. For one thing, it’s original intellectual property. And second, the game allows players to take guns completely out of the equation. Tom Farrer, producer of Mirror’s Edge, said that while a lot of other games have touched upon first-person action, including Thief and Breakdown, no one has ever followed through for a complete game experience. By combining elements of first person shooters and third person action, the developers place as much emphasis on what the main character, Faith, does with a gun in her hand as what she does without.

Edge opens up gameplay options that have long been relegated to third-person action titles. Faith is as acrobatic as the Prince from Prince of Persia, but gamers look through her eyes at all times. For a shooter, DICE made a bold choice in allowing gamers to play through Mirror’s Edge in its entirety without ever picking up a gun. That said, there are plenty of guns to go around and Faith can blow away anyone she pleases. But for those gamers with a penchant for pacifism and women’s Olympic-level gymnastics, her athletic ability and swift feet can get through the dicey situations (That’s right, another dice reference. Deal with it.).

“We focused on the through-the-character experience, rather than through-the-gun,” said Farrer. “Most shooters are just about a gun that’s kind of floating around and you forget about the person that’s holding the gun. We wanted to give a sense of physicality and let people know they can use their legs and arms to reach up and grab something or climb up something.”

Like the aforementioned Prince, Faith can run on walls. DICE has created a strong aspect of momentum-based gameplay, which keeps the pace moving quickly and rewards players for pulling off fast-thinking maneuvers. Farrer said it’s easy to vault over something, but if you time it right you can vault over something, slide underneath a wall and then jump to a zip line. The skill element of the game comes from the timing of these multiple moves.

Mirror’s Edge isn’t all about working the trigger, beating government agents into hamburger with your bare hands or pulling off parkour moves. DICE threw in a hodgepodge of different game elements from puzzles that feature environmental navigation, to a variety of chases (both being pursued by cops or chasing other people), and lots of action. The game employs a combat fighting ballet system, which allows Faith to quickly disarm any enemy in the game. Farrer said this element is an homage to Jason Bourne. But unlike those Bourne films (and Sierra’s recent game), Mirror’s Edge is not set in the real world.

“The world is a city that doesn’t exist, but we’ve designed it as a city that could exist,” explained Farrer. “We looked at things happening around the world and pushed them one step further or brought elements together. It’s a very controlled society, but it’s not a dictatorship. Communication, traffic, and the Internet are all very controlled. Some people object to this and there were riots and protests that were put down very brutally. These dissenters were pushed to the edge of society, which is the edge you hear in the title. That group of people had to go back and rely on an older form of communication, hand delivery. People called ‘runners’ deliver these packages and messages to people who live on the edge. Faith is one of these runners.”

As the story unfolds, Faith is hunted by the government and the police, but players always will have a choice of how she handles these authority figures. And, as a result, the game will always offer a unique experience.

“Faith can tackle the cops with pure melee, or disarm them, or simply shoot them,” said Farrer. “There are hundreds of different ways just to play a simple staircase sequence, which is one of the great things about this game.”

–John Gaudiosi

Mirror’s Edge will ship sometime in 2008 on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Catch the story trailer and screens from Mirror’s Edge.