Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is something unexpected from a major publisher, an open-world game built around movement, platforming and free-running, not fighting. But to get there, and to expand the cult game that serves as the basis for this reboot, took a lot of work. We sat down with Jeremy Miller, the producer, to talk about Faith and building a very different kind of open-world game.
The core movement system from this series is something unique. What are some of the challenges for doing parkour in the first person, from a game design perspective?
It’s been a long journey. Having it work in third-person doesn’t mean it works in first. The core requirement we had was fluid first person movement and combat, we had a quality we wanted to hit. As time went on, we realized we had to rebuild the system from the ground up with new technology, and a big part of that was getting a sense of “What does the player need to execute what they think is the right thing to execute?” Players would jump for a ledge, miss it, and not know why.
We realized you can’t see your feet all the time, so your perception of when to jump is different. So we had to adjust the system to provide a little more flexibility around that. We built a prediction-based system that underlies the whole thing, it tries to understand what the player is trying to do. There’s no helping system, but we looked at the code, dug into it, and fine-tuned it.
Did you struggle with making it feel natural?
We had to look at how we were creating animations. In the first one, we had fairly long non-interruptable animations. You’d go into a vault and it had a very polished flow, but it didn’t have enough control. As a result, we have a hyper-complex system of branching animation that allows the player to interact as the animation is happening. To get that fluidity, it’s just repetition and polish. Every playtest, there was one little hitch in one little animation… (laughs)
What research did you do into parkour and free-running? What did you keep and what did you have to revise?
We did a lot of investigation into it. Parkour is not always inherently fluid. There’s a whole part of it focused on agility and dexterity. So we went back and forth between free-running and parkour. It’s more of that free-running sense, that the urban landscape is your racetrack, a place where you never have to stop moving if you don’t want to.
This game does away with guns, at least for players, entirely. What drove that decision from a gameplay angle? How did it affect the story?
That was something pretty early that we decided on. In the first game, we know why the experience was designed that way, contrasting what it means to pick up a gun. We felt it wasn’t inherently a Mirror’s Edge experience. Over time, we did some investigation and realized we had the technology to do what we wanted to do. And the desire!
The challenge in it, is high-speed first-person melee combat isn’t a heavily explored genre. There weren’t really clear examples out there in AAA games. Once we locked down on the idea that Faith as a character, we wanted her to be perceived as an amazing unique hero. That was one of the big motivations, how do we keep combat a part of movement and not separate from movement? It was a truly innovative process to go through and determine how we’d even make this system feel right in first person.
It was a bit jolting to kick somebody and have them stagger right off a ledge.
At its heart is the concept of momentum. What does momentum mean when it comes to combat? So it’s about you having momentum, and translating that momentum onto other people. We didn’t want the player to just sit there and punch. This wasn’t a simple thing to get into. Being able to manipulate or dodge your guards, the outcome should also be movement. As we got further along, that sense of building momentum and having multiple outcomes built. We realized how fun it was to wall-run and hit somebody into someone else.
Why a reboot, and not a sequel?
All of us have this love and appreciation for the first one. As we were exploring what we wanted to do, we realized that we wanted to expand on the moveset and deepening the world, creating a more robust universe for her. To do that justice, we wanted to the freedom to pay homage to the original and to set up what we wanted to set up. We thought it was an engaging experience of Faith evolving and becoming this hero. How does she change?
Is there any little detail that took more work than players might think?
Doors! (laughs) I would just keep going back to the combat, and trying to accomplish that. The challenge in there being that it’s so tied to the environment, it’s somewhere you have to read the environment, know Faith’s moveset, react to AI, and then do these tweaks on top of that, and build the environment to work properly… it took a really long time to put it together. It’s an amazing experience to watch somebody play the game and it start clicking, starting to use their momentum, applying that growth that they’ve had to it.
This is pretty unique, a game that’s largely an open-world platformer. How’d you get such a different game through the AAA gauntlet?
I was on the project for about two years. It’s been a passion of DICE. That passion has never really left since the first game. I think that there were a few things that came together. The big thing was Frostbite getting to the point where we could do what we wanted to do, at the fidelity that could elevate. I’m just really glad, and in a way proud, of the team for doing that. It’s a unique experience to be a part of, and very tough as well. You can’t just point to a game and say “It’s like this.”
Where do you want to see the players at the end?
The dream is that we have the player exploring the moveset by themselves, that they get to a sense that they’re so comfortable with it, because there is a lot of little things that we put in, little tweaks because everything can branch into everything. The fastest way to turn around is to slide, do a quickturn, and shift forward out of that. My dream there is to take somebody who’s never played Mirror’s Edge, and they naturally begin to understand the system, and then discover new moves we don’t even mention.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.