Mirror's Edge Sequel May Still Be Running

[Catchy Slogan]

Well here's hoping. I very much doubt that EA is hurting financially in any significant way, so they need to start taking some risks instead of sticking only to cookie-cutter FPSes and such. With their development department that is...they're doing fine as far as publishing goes for the most part.

Oh? Because sticking with the cookie-cutter sports games they release every year has been going so bad for them. ;P

But I agree, it would be nice to take a risk on something that has the pontential to be great. I loved the first one (though the combat made me want to pull my teeth out) and I was actually looking forward to a sequal, because they could only make it better.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

I don't understand why people didn't enjoy the first one anyway. The story sort of sucked, but the gameplay was brilliantly original and a lot of fun.

An unbalanced difficulty curve, needlessly-finicky platforming mechanics and some extremely frustrating combat in the later sections bogged down the pure, undiluted brilliance of the running and jumping.

In my opinion, a reviewer doesn't have a right to give Mirror's Edge a number score until they've at least tried the Time Trials, which do away with a lot of the game's major problems.

The big problem with Mirror's Edge was the design team chose to highlight the wrong things to promote to players. Speed play and the Time Trials were overlooked in the promotions and presentation of the game in favor of highlighting the campaign mode. This overemphasis of weaknesses extends into the campaign, where the game attempts to place a strong focus on combat sections and disarming enemies (a big part of the tutorial is combat). The cinemas were total crap-folks have compared them to Esurance commercials, but Esurance commercials look BETTER, whereas the few cutscenes rendered in the game's engine looked amazing.

Overall, I got the impression that the game devs had designed a great game, but didn't understand what part of it was great.

 

[Taerdin]

Its unfortunate that so many people found problems with Mirror's Edge... personally I loved it. Its easily among my top games, ever.

 

[DementedSheep]

Do want! That game had so many flaws and the characters and story weren?t great (or at least not presented well with the focus on the wrong things, some of the underlying plot sounded like it could be interesting. Eh personal taste) but it still manages to be one of my fav games. Odd isn?t it? I could go on about the problems in mirrors edge and when I think about it I really shouldn?t like this game but something about it is just so addictive and immersive I can?t hate it. First person platforming? HELL YEAHI never got the people who had issue with it being in 1st person. I was hoping there would be a sequel and they would take the opportunity to learn from and fix the mistakes of the first game.

 

[Ninjat_126]

Mirrors Edge made me say at one point; "Did you see that!!? I just wall ran behind that guard kicked the gun out of his hands, dropkicked his mate off the side of the building turned round and punched him unconscious!"

To paraphrase ZP...

"Did you see that! Did you fucking see that! I am squirting machisma out of my nipples over here! I am a monster truck that walks like a man!"

(From now on, those moments will be referred to as Monster Truck Walks Like Man moments.)



Those sort of crazily awesome moments made the game for me. I actually started speaking 1337 at one point and trash-talking the clunky slow trudging mortals for daring to believe they could be considered even remotely capable of bringing down someone as truly awesome as me.

Then I went into an air duct.

 

[zombiesinc]

I hope this holds up! I loved Mirror's Edge, and if they have the chance to improve upon the elements that weren't so strong in it, then I think it'd be an even better game (well, that's obvious, hurrdurr).

In the mean time I suppose I'll actually try the iPad version.

 

[nipsen]

"Fascinated how serious game media sites can stir up an article based on rumor milling, loose quotes and assumptions."

Oh, haha. Let's see. Someone high up in EA insists in a Swedish magazine that a sequel has been stalled because the first game didn't sell enough. But assuming that the sequel is canned is /far from the truth/. Oh, no. It's still being developed, kinda, sort of..

You know what the best part is? It's that if the game actually was blessed with a larger production budget, it would end up a shitty sequel with arcade controls, hollywood writing by people who are apparently 13 years old, more violence, and more shooting.

All in all, if they are doing this in their spare time, it's going to be the best game.

 

[ProGrasTiNation]

E.A have more money than the Vatican,so i cant see Mirrors edge 2 being canceled,its just not as important as the other yearly E.A crap

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

Run, Faith, run!

 

[Norix596]

Perhaps a better method than having one "right" path and then a "secret" path would be to have several side my side to get to objectives and players could chose while still in motion what kind of maneuvers they are best at or if they want to risk a more difficult approach for some extra time.

Also, the few bits of cutscene with the game's 3-D models look GORGEOUS- what's with all the 4 color cartoons...?

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

Yeah, the cartoony cutscenes totally looked out of place.

In a sequel most of all I would like to see better gunplay and easier disarms, considering that getting to an enemy without being shot is all a pain by itself. Other than that the game was great. I especially liked its atmosphere and the minimalistic design. But gameplay was superb too, as much the parcouring (but it's probably a lot better for us, pc gamers, due to the precision mouse), as close combat (first good close combat in a FPS I gather). Story didn't make a lot of sense, though, but since it's a trilogy I'm hoping they will shed some light onto what was happening in that fictive world of theirs.

 

[CobraX]

I don't see why anyone liked Mirror's Edge, The Controls sucked, It was executed poorly, and the story could put people to sleep...

 

[Sion_Barzahd]

Mirrors edge was amazing, sure i wasn't very good at it and got my ass handed back to me repeatedly, but i loved it all the while.

 

[wizard_joe88]

Yes! This game really does deserve a sequel, I'm so happy!

 

[cabalistics]

Hopefully all the press will make EA reconsider their priorities and push Mirrors Edge 2 to the top of the queue and we can see a sequel sooner rather than later

 

[Metalrocks]

i hope there will be a part 2. i still play part 1 and still like it. its just something else and different. but it sure needs improvements which i hope will be in part 2. i also hope the story will be clearer because it was a bit unclear whats really all about.
well, lets just wait and see. maybe next year we might play it already.

 

[Hatchet90]

Give it another shot EA. The first one showed a hell of a lot of promise.

 

[Therumancer]

To be entirely honest, there is a lot that could be done with the premise of a courier delivering messages for underground groups back and forth through a darkly utopian future. The problem with the game was a weak storyline, and some seriously broken mechanics, as well as the thing basically being a glorified time trial with very little else involved in it comparitively speaking.

I'll also be honest in saying that Parkour was cool for about 5 minutes a few years ago, it's popularity helped by a chase scene at the beginning of one of the "new" James Bond movies, and a bit of pumping up by some minority groups presenting it as a true sport with origins untainted by the white man (or so I have read from some of the hype). To the nerd culture it was simply kind of cool to watch people run around like in a Jackie Chan movie. In practicality it amounted to a lot of kids with no grasp of things like isometrics (I think I have the right term) trying to imitate it and of course failing utterly leading to the fad rapidly slinking back down to the fringes.

I for one still tend to wince whenever in Prototype Alex Mercer doing pretty typical comic book Clinging/Super Speed tricks is referred to as doing "super parkour" due to it's hipness at the time and I guess a desire to seperate him from merely being "like a combination of Spider Man and The Flash with the abillity to generate bio weapons".

I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me, and I've gotten some pretty rude responses to expressing this opinion/observation before, but the bottom line is that I think "Mirrors Edge" actually suffered from it's sheer amount of focus on the whole Parkour thing, and not enough focus on the actual storyline, or creating much in the way of compelling gameplay. I think that if they kept the same evasion-type gameplay with some combat elements, changed a lot of the free running stuff to be more generalized acrobatics, or rather just avoided using the word "Parkour", and added more challenges to the game itself other than trying to shave microseconds off performance time, and have them revolve around a more detailed storyline that had you actually invested in the sides and their conflict rather than taking it at face value that the bad guys (who are running a really nice city) are bad... and well they might be onto something.

I guess what it comes down to is that it reminds me a lot of the much-mocked later skateboarding games, where you've basically got these cities that seem to be designed as a skateboarder paradise, with these bad guys who arbitrarily decide they naturally hate skateboarders despite having designed everything like that, and a resulting "fight the power" storyline that is based off of this mind blowing silliness. The differance with Mirror's Edge despite a solid concept (evasion based pursuit game in a dark dystopian future masquerading as a utopian one) is simply that Parkour never became as big as skateboarding or generated the subculture people hoped it would... and well, there aren't really any product placements in Mirror's Edge. I mean Faith doesn't fight the power by promoting the Baconator.

 

[Valanthe]

snip

You know, I never really had a problem with the linearity. The Time Trials do a lot to address that complaint. I only played a little of the time trials, but they seem to have condensed a lot of what makes Mirror's Edge awesome.

I agree that guns presented a moral decision, but unfortunately it was a decision that highlighted the crappiest parts of the actual game. The gunplay is very poor and directly contradicts every unique game mechanic, particularly the "building up speed" one that the ENTIRE game is built around. Then again, if you could use guns and run at full speed, nobody WOULDN'T use guns. So I think they need to remove Faith's ability to use guns and give us some other option. You know, it's actually pretty hard for normal, untrained people to just pick up and fire automatic weapons accurately. Maybe they should do something like that-make guns so inaccurate that they're essentially worthless. So Faith could easily use that Baton the police guy had, because anyone can use a club, but she'd ignore the gun.

Or they could just go with the Bruce Wayne "durr, I won't use guns to save my own life because somebody did something bad with them years ago" approach.

I will confess that moving from a linear game to a sandbox would be a big shift in focus that might ultimately ruin a sequel, but hopefully it's something the designers kick around the table a few times. As far as guns go, however, I can see what you mean, in the special features for the original there is a sort of "dev diary" where they talk about how they originally planned for Faith to have a handgun with her and ultimately removed it to encourage the idea of avoiding conflict, so taking that a step further and having Faith do a Bruce Wayne and take the "moral high ground" isn't much of a stretch.

 

[AetherWolf]

I'd still like to get an idea of what kind of sequel it's gonna be.
I've seen rumors all over the place. Including but not limited to: It'll be a prequel, that it'll be a sandbox game in the vein of GTA, the protagonist will be your own custom-made runner, or that it will be an MMO... so yeah.