Release date 11 Nov 2008
http://www.on-mirrors-edge.com/
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/m...g=tabs;summary
Update:
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3168631
[yt]EEMZkXizp3s[/yt]
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3168693&p=37
http://www.on-mirrors-edge.com/
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/m...g=tabs;summary
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| Redwood City, CA. – July 10th 2007 – Electronic Arts Inc., (NASDAQ: ERTS) today confirmed that it has a new game in development for next generation consoles and the PC at its EA DICE studio in Stockholm. Mirror's Edge is a revolutionary new take on the First Person Action Adventure category. Patrick Soderlund, General Manager of EA DICE, commented: "We are a studio that believes in taking risks and taking games in new directions. We made the sandbox experience viable and enjoyable in Battlefield and now, we are looking to do something radical with the traditional established mechanics of first person movement." Senior producer, Owen O'Brien, commented: "We want to change the way that players are able to move in first person. No more restrictions, no more being blocked by simple barriers such as walls and fences. We want to enable the player to move like a real person, with the ability to run, jump, vault and slide in a way that has never been seen before in a first person game." Mirror's Edge will ship in calendar year 2008 for the PLAYSTATION3 computer entertainment system, Xbox 360 videogame and entertainment system and for the PC and is being developed at EA DICE in Stockholm, Sweden. This product is not yet rated by PEGI or ESRB. For more information on EA DICE, please visit www.dice.se or www.ea.com. |
Update:
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3168631
[yt]EEMZkXizp3s[/yt]
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Previews: Mirror's Edge EA Dice explains how you make a first-person game without the traditional gun fetishism.  Click the image above to see a cell-shaded trailer depicting Mirror's Edge."Let's make a game without vehicles or guns." That's the challenge that Mirror's Edge senior producer Owen O'Brien gave his co-workers at EA DICE, the studio behind the very guns-and-vehicles-driven Battlefield franchise. O'Brien elaborates on how that initial pitch started to shape Mirror's Edge into what it is today. "If you think about it, what we did was take Battlefield, but [we] went to the opposite extreme," O'Brien says. "Instead of being about big open spaces, it's now about a focused city. Instead of being about men with vehicles and weapons, it's now about an unarmed female character out on her own." O'Brien then goes on to discuss how the core free-running/parkour mechanic was established first, and the rest of the game stemmed from that initial concept. When asked about any particular inspiration for Mirror's Edge's fictional city (which he describes as an amalgamation of cities that the developers are fans of), O'Brien freely admits to being heavily influenced by the works of TV/movie writer Joss Whedon (in fact, O'Brien jokes about outright plagiarizing him). He specifically cites Whedon's director's commentary in the DVD of Serenity. In the Serenity universe, Whedon said, "The empire isn't evil -- it just thinks it's right and can't understand why people wouldn't want to live by its rules." O'Brien says that at a particular point in the commentary, Whedon noted that "you can't make other people live by your rules of society, even if your society is better" -- and that turn of phrase actually serves as the main catalyst for the concept and feel of the city in ME. "Even if your society has better health care and cleaner, safer streets, those are just rules. But if people don't want to live by those rules or be a part of that, they shouldn't be ostracized or even criminalized. But that is the sort of thing that's happened in the city," O'Brien says. "Over the years, more and more strict laws have been implemented. They were small things at first, but they eventually became more controlling. Now, it's not a 'police state.' People are probably very happy, in fact. They're just very controlled. [They have] given up personal freedom for a comfortable life. That's one of the central issues of the game: How much freedom are you willing to give up for a comfortable life? So there are people on the outer edge of the city who have an inherent distrust of technology, which is where the concept of Runners [Runners are sort of like data couriers; the main character, Faith, is a Runner -- Ed.] came from." After touching on the backstory, O'Brien shows off some more of the actual gameplay. If an FPS' core experience is "run forth and be a good shot," then ME's core free-running experience is "run forth and maintain your momentum." Your goal in ME is to always get where you need to be in an expedient yet stylish manner. To preserve the sensation of motion and flow, the developers employ tricks and tweaks, such as having the camera bob a certain way when running or Faith kick down doors in her way (stopping to open one like a normal person would just completely ruin the momentum). With this goal for the moment-to-moment experience, the gameplay focuses around chases, navigational puzzles, and even free-running-focused combat. A simple control scheme fuels all of this, and it can be reduced to three things: move, look, and up/down. Fundamentally, the player is deciding how best to move forward, upward, or downward at any given moment. One aid for this is the "Runner Vision," which outlines optimal paths to your goal in red. O'Brien uses Jason Bourne as an analogy for how Runner Vision works, saying, "Runner Vision is our way of showing people how Runners view the world. The same way a Runner sees a navigation opportunity in a nearby pipe or overhang is how Bourne would interpret a person's hand as a potential weapon." Runner Vision is also the only other visual element besides the ultraminimalist HUD -- ultraminimalist as in "there's just a center reticule." This reticule provides two things: a stable point for your eyes to focus on (to help deal with motion sickness since there is more disorientation and movement in ME than in other FPS games) and the "Reaction Time" meter. Reaction time is portrayed as a blue outline around the reticule, and you build it by pulling off slick moves. You then use your Reaction Time to fine-tune big moments, such as massive leaps across buildings or attempts to dodge and disarm multiple bad guys. O'Brien freely admits that Reaction Time is "our take on bullet time." After explaining these systems, O'Brien shows off more of the actual gameplay. He demonstrates how the free-running gameplay overcomes a frequent obstacle in first-person shooters: the mighty meter-high fence. "It's always frustrated me how in other games, you can save the universe, but you can't hop a fence or a hedge," O'Brien says. He then demonstrates different ways to get past a fence. The simplest, most inelegant solution is to climb over it, but that takes time and is clumsy. In keeping with the "maintain momentum" motto, a better way to get over the fence is to use the environment (such as a nearby roof panel or pipe) to create a more "flowing" series of jumps and rebounds that help you sail over the fence. After overcoming the mighty fence, O'Brien brings up that one of the first questions the media asked after seeing the first ME trailer back in GDC 2008 was "Is this game just about running on white rooftops?" He answers this by loading up a level where Faith is fleeing down some storm drains to evade capture. In contrast to the clean white roofs of previous footage, the storm drains are, as O'Brien admits, a mix of the same drains you'd find underneath Tokyo and the Mines of Moria from The Fellowship of the Ring. These drains illustrate more of the puzzle-platforming aspects of the game, such as using the cramped passageways and pipelines to maneuver up and around the area. Faith can use motion and momentum to take her foes down even when the gameplay shifts from puzzle navigation to combat. O'Brien runs Faith up a wall, jumps off, and then lands on a soldier to take him out. Later, Faith darts around a small squad of soldiers, using well-placed jumps, kicks, and punches to subdue them with style. "It should be easy to do cool things," he says. "Doing spectacular things is when you pull off a series of cool things, and stringing together movements to pull off spectacular maneuvers in both combat and navigation is where player skill comes in." O'Brien picks up an enemy rifle. "Now, when you pick up a weapon, you have no moves available to you. Picking up a gun is a conscious decision to sacrifice agility and speed in favor of short-term firepower," he says. While Faith fires all the bullets and then discards the gun, he mentions that "a particular goal of mine is to create a game where I'm happy to throw away the shotgun." He also points out that there will likely be an Xbox 360 Achievement specifically for completing the game without shooting a gun. Before concluding his demonstration, O'Brien gives us a really random fact: In every level, a rat gets killed in an interesting way. In the storm drains area, we saw a soldier snipe a rat from across the room. Look for more hands-on impressions (and possible rat-death sightings) in our E3 coverage next week. |
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| Previews: Mirror's Edge Our first hands-on with DICE's take on first-person parkour. You're reading an E3 2008 preview, which we've broken into three sections to make it easy to sift through during this week of convention madness. Check out E3.1UP.COM for all (meaning words, screens, and videos) of our E3 2008 coverage. What's the game about? Mirror's Edge is a first-person action game influenced by parkour, a sport in which you have to traverse dangerous terrain -- such as leaping from one building to another in ninja-like fashion -- without using any sort of equipment. In the game you play as Faith, one of the many so-called runners in charge of relaying important information from one party to the next without being detected by law enforcement or other branches of a totalitarian government. What's new for E3? This is the same level we saw a little while ago at EA's pre-E3 event where Faith is chased into massive storm drain tunnels, modeled after the real-life thing found in Japan. But whereas we previously had to sit back and watch someone else play it, we've finally been able to get our hands on the game and feel what it's like to perform ridiculous feats of athleticism in first-person. What's our take? This level is a great way to come to grips with the controls in Mirror's Edge, if only for the simple reason that you can take on the opening area at a more leisurely pace, and mess around with some of Faith's moves. Within a matter of seconds, we had her performing slides, wall-runs, and even a few 180-wall jumps here and there (it takes some extra time to do them consistently because of the timing and finger dexterity involved). The controls are pretty intuitive, once you get used to the idea that the primary action buttons are mapped to the two left shoulder buttons as opposed to the face buttons. What's interesting about Mirror's Edge is that by the time you make your way to the first series of platforms in the second portion of this level, you almost instinctively know where to go because of the way the level is designed, and not necessarily because of the Runner Vision feature, which color codes specific objects as a means for revealing potential paths. Most of that can be attributed to the fact that there's a certain level of realism in Mirror's Edge in so much that objects like ladders, boxes, and pipes are all placed in logical locations -- or at least they're logical for someone with the ability to run up and down walls and fling herself around like Spider-Man. The same goes for the last part of the level where you have to make your way up an enormous drain -- there's just a certain fluidity to it all, and it's that very same characteristic that will make you want to blast through the level at full speed whether you're skilled enough to do so or not. Does this all mean that you'll make every single jump on your first try? Not necessarily. It still takes some time to get adjusted to the first-person perspective and timing your jumps in relation to where you think the ledge is. But the checkpoints are also pretty forgiving at this point, so it looks like you won't have to start too far from where you fell to your death. But, what's not so fluid right now is the combat. While it's great fun to run towards enemies and either run off a wall and execute a jump kick to the coconut, or a slide kick right to the picnic basket, standard punching feels a little sloppy and almost out of place. And unfortunately, that's what you'll have to resort to using in some cases when you fail to perform a disarm move, because you have to wait another few seconds before the disarm option becomes available. Still, we're encouraged by the fact that hand-to-hand combat isn't a necessity in Mirror's Edge, and that Faith can get along just fine using her crazy acrobatic skills to evade enemies. |
