Mirror's Edge Interview
Insights into one of the most anticipated games of 2008.
Australia, September 24, 2008 - At GC Asia 2008 last week, we caught up with Mirror's Edge producer Tom Farrer to have a chat about what we believe will be one of the most unique and just plain cool games of 2008. Here's what he had to say…
IGN AU: Mirror's Edge certainly has the most believable first person perspective to date, but are there any areas you've identified that could help make it even more immersive? I found, for instance, that the fact that you're still using a thumbstick meant that movement was still a little jerky – how much can you smooth something like that out?
Tom Farrer: You always encounter this problem, and we definitely hit it in a few places with how good you want something to look and feel versus how playable you want the game to be. For instance, we have quite a lot of systems for her legs. We haven't actually used all of them – maybe we will at a later date, but one of them is that generally, if you have a body in first person, and most games don't, but the ones that do, you'll notice that the legs look a bit crap; sort of sliding and stuff when you look down and move around, and so we had a really beautiful system where she would move much more naturally, but the knock on for that was that you couldn't make microscopic adjustments because she would adjust a certain amount or degree.
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IGN AU: You were waiting for the animation to play out.
Tom Farrer: Yeah, and it's tiny, but it feels really off, so we didn't do it. Well, we did, but then we removed it. So we've done that on a number of things – we've done things that are really beautiful or look really cool, but we decided that they just didn't feel right. For example when you're playing she can stop pretty quickly, even from a full sprint, and you can say 'well, that's not right, she should really have more inertia'. We tried that and it was just really really irritating. What else did we try? Bullets hitting you should slow you down, which we thought made perfect sense and would be really cool, but it was so irritating.
IGN AU: There's not much you can do if you're running away and someone's shooting you in the back – you can't dodge that.
Tom Farrer: Yeah, so if you got hit just before a jump or something you wouldn't make it, so that got scrapped.
IGN AU: Tell me a little bit more about the game's fictional city. What were your sources of inspiration in its design? I know the storm drains were inspired by Tokyo, but what other places did you look to?
Tom Farrer: We looked at a lot of places because we wanted this east meets west vibe, so we were looking at places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai… even whitewashed villas in Greece for style and tone, and quality of lighting and stuff like that. There's all kinds of influences. In terms of the way we wanted to build the levels and the area, we were looking at places like New York, which just has the fabulous kind of vertigo, but we didn't want a rigid, gridded system because it's quite restrictive, so then we were looking at Tokyo and it's got a more organic structure, it's also got a lot of height variation which makes for cool platforming, so we started pulling in elements from all of those places to create one location.
A second ago she was in the crane stance; clearly the most powerful martial arts move of all time.
IGN AU: In terms of the totalitarian regime that rules over this world, were there any films or novels that inspired the story?
Tom Farrer: No, I think it's more just stuff that's going on in the world, all over the place right now. One thing is – it's not strictly a totalitarian regime or government there. People always latch on to something like that because it's quite a prevalent idea in games and movies. 'Oh, it's a tough government, they must be an awful regime like 1984 or something like that' but it isn't; the idea behind the city is that it's more of a nanny state that's just gone too far. So yeah, it could be anything, from the fuss over the introduction of ID cards, the regulation of the Internet, all of those kinds of things. We're seeing them all the time, whether it's national DNA databases or the fact that I'm being fingerprinted and having my photo taken when I'm getting off a plane.
IGN AU: It's definitely quite a stark world, but where are all the people? Are there going to be any more populated areas?
Tom Farrer: Well, looking down at the street, we've got traffic and civilians wandering around, but we don't do any direct, y'know, running through crowds of people or anything like that. It would be cool, but when you're looking at the stuff you're going to do you pick the areas that you're going to focus on, so we focused on the movement and working on the geometry in the areas, so while we've got little peds and people wandering around in the distance we never bring them super close to you. And she's generally in places that aren't going to be massively populated.
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