Our earliest surprise with Mirror's Edge was just at seeing something so new and unique coming from the team that had previously stuck rather closely to their popular Battlefield series of games. DICE senior producer Owen O'Brien told us, "It's risky having a studio built on one franchise, because if that franchise fails, then everything fails.... The easiest thing would have been to do Battlefield redressed, or a clone, and say it's our new [intellectual property]. We probably would've been quite successful, but it wouldn't really be a new IP." O'Brien goes on to explain how Mirror's Edge actually began its life as a series of prototype urban areas in Battlefield 2.
Discussing one of the few possible weaknesses with the game that has come up in talks around the 1UP offices, O'Brien said the focus away from guns is an integral part of the atmosphere they're trying to build in the game. He used "female Jason Bourne" as an example of the feeling they were going for, adding, "It's not that Bourne doesn't use weapons, but he just uses them as a means to an end and then usually dismantles them and throws them away.... I still wonder if we should've done it without any weapons whatsoever, but I like giving the player the option. If we get a lot of feedback from people saying they'd like a game with no weapons, maybe that's what we'd do for the sequel."
DICE also spoke to us about some of the problems they faced in bringing a first-person viewpoint to a new style of gameplay, including motion sickness, which personally affected art director Johannes Soderqvist. Thankfully, that issue was overcome quite quickly, as he explained: "To me, it comes down to the amount of control that I have -- the predictability of the moves. I've noticed it in games where the controls aren't based around skill. The game does something for you while you're running, or you have a lot of outside influences on the body or car or whatever you're using.... But I think in Mirror's Edge -- what people don't get from the trailer and so on -- is how much skill is involved and how much you actually decide on your own."
The full article explores many more elements of Mirror's Edge, including their approach to graphics, the music, movies, and comics that have inspired the game, and an interview with writer Rhianna Pratchett about the process of building the game's plot. The new issue of EGM with the fine cover featured above will be arriving in subscriber mailboxes this week, and it should start showing up on newsstands shortly thereafter.
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