The History of Mirror's Edge

in the late 2000s our core emerged from obscurity and took over mainstream entertainment movies YouTube videos and video games alike took to the urban jungle so that they could showcase the activity in all of its glory and entertain audiences with fast paced thrills and no other video game managed to thrill quite like Mirror's Edge the brainchild of Swedish video game developer dice Mirror's Edge thrust players into the shoes of faith a raven-haired courier tasked with delivering messages across the rooftops of a gleaming dystopia while many found the sum of its offerings to be far from perfect most agreed that running through the metropolis was a delight and that it's clean minimalist art was a welcome breath of fresh air from the brows and Gray's of his competitors after Mirror's Edge came and went however it quickly became apparent that it would be a while longer before fans would be able to return to faiths world while dice would repeatedly express its desires to continue building out its budding parkour series rumors and new stories alike perpetually suggested that dice either was at a crossroads on how to proceed with it or simply not working on it at all and the more years that passed the more of the studios seemed to become further entrenched in the Battlefield franchise in the end however the series would finally receive a second lease on life nearly a decade later in the form of Mirror's Edge catalyst an open-world reimagining of dices opus that would be met with equal parts fanfare and frustration this is the history of Mirror's Edge [Music] the mid-2000s were a restless period for dice Electronic Arts ever interested in expanding its repertoire of developers had come to own a majority stake in the Stockholm based studio and seemed intent on acquiring it in full both parties had worked together amicably on the battlefield series in the past and there was no reason to suggest that the forthcoming acquisition would fracture their relationship yet many within the studio wanted to stretch their creative muscles and remind the world that dice was still independent for the time being that it still had the means to create something wholly original and unique over the course of a year and a half a host of closely knit teams within dice came together to pitch a variety of new game concepts to dice as then CEO Patrick Sutherland soderlund was no less interested at the time and showing off his Studios creative acumen but he also wanted to ensure that whatever they made next would prove worthwhile and found it difficult to get on board with most of their pitches nothing stood out to him as being so original or unique that it was begging to be made until one day one of the teams presented him with a pitch for a first-person parkour game at first soderlund was skeptical of its potential he knew as well as any of DICE's designers that in order for it to be successful the studio would need to work hard to ensure players were provided with a strong sense of spatial awareness within its virtual world and felt consistently comfortable navigating it when his first demo made the rounds of the company however it was almost immediately apparent that its creators had stumbled upon something special powering up and around obstacles within its environment felt simply sublime as well as drastically different from anything else that had come before it while questions still about it about how the parkour game would function as a full feature complete experience soderlund couldn't deny anymore that they had stumbled upon something of Merit yet he would only truly get on board with it amperes designers returned with a new prototype that featured even more refined movement and a bright minimalist art style the latter was immediately striking and utterly unlike the overwhelmingly drab color palettes that were infesting so many other games within the industry at the time it was immediately apparent to all involved that with a single screenshot they would be able to instantly sent their project apart from their competitors and communicate to players that they were trying to do something different [Music] Mirror's Edge was officially greenlit but dices work was only just beginning while many within the studio were already decently comfortable with the way their parkour game controlled they knew that most players would have difficulty coming to grips with it would they suffer from motion sickness when they booted it up for the first time and sick or not how easily would they be able to wrap their heads around its gameplay these questions lingered over their heads and over the next few years the team would try its best to implement features and changes that enhanced its usability and uniqueness and equal measure for example the team decided early on that when faith would approach an object in her environment that could be useful for progression like a pipe or a ramp the object in question would highlight in red this feature which the team would dubbed runner vision allowed them to not only communicate more easily to players how they could best get through the game's levels but also fill set levels with a novel defect that worked well with the rest of its visual style likewise when developing the game's user interface the team decided to remove as many on-screen graphics as possible in order to make players feel like they had truly stepped into faiths shoes but they made a point of keeping a single small dot at the screen center as they found that doing so less in motion sickness and gave players an aiming point when attempting to grab objects while many decisions and adjustments of this nature took place during the project's early stages fully getting the mechanics and world of Mirror's Edge right took the entirety of its development period it was a challenge the likes of which nobody had dice had ever experienced before but at the end of the day the team took solace in knowing that unless they had good reason to do so their corporate overlords were unlikely to step in and cancel Mirror's Edge out of the blue the amount of people who were assigned to it was fairly small by the standards of most triple-a developments and while nobody wanted it to perform poorly there was no concern that dice would go under if it flopped at retail rain or shine the studio already had the financial backing of the Battlefield series and EA keeping it insulated from harm and because it was based in Sweden representatives from EA weren't popping in too frequently to question the game's progress when Mirror's Edge finally released in November of 2008 it came less than a month after the release of visceral games of dead space and was spotlighted alongside the latter by EA as evidence of its willingness to experiment with new original properties yet unlike dead space which managed to receive almost universal acclaim mirrors edges reception was notably more divisive players almost universally concurred that the game did a fantastic job of making one feel as if they had stepped into faiths shoes and making most of the game's hurdles feel genuinely thrilling to overcome unlike so many other games that featured first-person perspectives controlling faiths felt like controlling a full-body human being who was actually going through all of the trials that were physically laid before instead of a disembodied arm that was floating through 3d space and there was almost no disagreement that the dystopia faith inhabited despite being inherently sinister was entrancing in its beauty with its clean minimalist visual style and it's quiet ambience sticking firm in the minds of most who experienced it yet many felt that all of this thrill and beauty was undercut by a number of ill-conceived design elements chief among these elements was the game's combat system faith punched in Kent awkwardly when confronting enemies and used stolen guns with little finesse from a narrative standpoint it made sense that faith wouldn't be a great fighter she was a runner not a trained soldier and thus had no reason to be naturally good at taking out other people but because the game forced many of these combat scenarios to happen and these combat scenarios didn't get any less frequent over the course of its campaign most players found this lack of combat ability hard to appreciate many also felt that while faith herself was a likeable heroine the story that she took part in over the course of the game was weak its plot was rambling its supporting cast was forgettable and the majority of it was shown off using animated cutscenes that felt at odds with the rest of the game's visual presentation at the end of the day however as much as some players felt that these issues cast an immeasurable long shadow the game strengths others found them easy to pardon from their perspective dice had created something truly unique and growing pains were inevitable when achieving something that had never been done before and while this enthusiasm wouldn't immediately translate into sales it would keep mirrors edge on the chip of the industry's tongue for a while after and result in its selling decently over time [Music] in an interview with us gamers shortly before Mirror's Edge released dices a1 O'Brien expressed that the studio had big plans for their parkour series going forward they saw their inaugural title as the first part of a trilogy of future releases that would focus on faiths journey and that beyond this there was plenty of room for future stories that could be told from other characters perspectives while other personnel from dice and EA would express less specific thoughts on where they exactly believed that the series was headed during this time almost everyone seemed to agree that the nacet series was deeply important to both companies and that a sequel was inevitable and before long not one but two new Mirror's Edge titles did arrive on the iPhone and on personal computers in the form of a flash game a full-bodied official sequel however would remain elusive over the years that would follow news rumors and speculation of Mirror's Edge his status would find their way online on a semi frequent basis but rarely did any of the three paint a picture of a series that was an amazing health at best the series proprietors were merely having difficulties figuring out where to take it next with EA CEO John wick Otello telling Kotaku in late 2009 that projects were actively being worked on and that the team was unsure whether they wanted to take them in more of an action focused direction or a more puzzle focused direction and at worst any and all developments on his future were frozen in place with Swedish outlet press to play TV implying as much in a report in 2010 not helping matters was the fact that all the while this was happening the battlefield series was becoming larger than ever before and stepping up to compete directly with the likes of Call of Duty from the outside it seemed as if the Swedish studio had its hands full and lack the bandwidth to develop anything other than its military shooter exactly what was going on behind the scenes that dies during this period and why it was taking it staffed so long to produce a follow-up to Mirror's Edge would only come into focus years later in a 2016 polygon article on the series's history soderlund would explain how once the dust surrounding the original Mirror's Edge settled he felt it important at the studio not rush at sequels development he wanted the series is next to be evolutionary instead of iterative and as a result decided to let small groups of developers within dice quietly pitch concepts that they believed would enable it to advance to the next level while the demands of the Battlefield series did stifle its development during this period the series for the most part progressed slowly because much like during the development of the original Mirror's Edge soderlund and others at EA were eager to take their time and quickly reject any pitch that these groups presented that didn't seem like it would be revolutionary [Music] [Music] with the hell [Music] eventually however dices Sara Johnstone and Erica do doll presented their superiors with the winning pitch noting that almost all of the other ideas that their peers had presented to them were linear and level based in structure the two pitched an open world iteration of Mirror's Edge where players would be able to freely explore the environment around them so Darland and the others were initially skeptical of the idea but eventually relented even if it wasn't on the scale of a grand theft auto an open world would allow the team to expand tremendously upon the game's movement mechanics as well as implement features that didn't work in holy linear environments like side quests once this aspect of the project was confirmed everything picked up steam in 2012 environments were blocked out narrative beasts were written up and faiths movement mechanics were tweaked and tailored to best suit the grand new world that she would soon be thrust into new mechanics were introduced such as skill trees that would allow players to level up faiths abilities while old ones such as gunplay were removed wholesale Mirror's Edge catalyst was born and its future appeared immeasurably bright when EA finally started showing catalyst off to the public however fans were cautiously optimistic about its prospects it was unbelievable that the studio was finally giving the series another lease on life but it was hard to tell at a glance whether the sequels litany of new bells and whistles would benefit or hinder it that most of the team working on catalyst was entirely new to the series only raised more concerns it was good to have new blood fueling creative endeavors but the team that had worked on the original Mirror's Edge had first-hand experience of what had gone right and wrong during its development would the catalyst team be able to channel what their predecessors had learned and deliver a better product when Mirror's Edge catalyst finally arrived in June of 2016 the answer to this question appeared to be no parking through a shining dystopia was as satisfying as ever but critics almost universally agreed that everything surrounding and complementing its bar chord was less than stellar its skill trees were awkwardly implemented its combat still didn't feel right and his story was yet again a disappointment its open-world setting between critics is range of emotions most tended to agree that exploring it yielded genuine moments of satisfaction but that this satisfaction couldn't fully stave off a sense of sterility that permeated its environments that the game had an open world period was also viewed by some as being a bit ironic well there was no argument that the open world succeeded in making catalyst feel very different from its predecessor it also made catalyst feel very similar to most of the other triple-eight games around it and historically mirrors such as the pill had been that it was so dissimilar to most of the other triple-eight games around it catalyst wasn't an utter disaster or even all that much worse than the original Mirror's Edge but after waiting nearly a decade for dice to take another swing at the series it was hard not to be disappointed by the studio second go [Music] before catalyst was released soderlund made it clear that the series future laid in the hands of the gaming community if they could convince dice that there was still a market for Mirror's Edge then it would oblige them with another entry and if they couldn't the studio would continue to focus its resources elsewhere unfortunately while catalyst didn't end up bombing its sales failed to paint a picture of an industry ravenous for more of face adventures with figures putting it between 1.7 and 2 million units sold given how long it took dice to release catalyst after the original Mirror's Edge it's not impossible that the Swedish studio might reemerge with a third entry after another equally long leave of absence but time cannot heal all wounds and EA is unlikely to return to this series until it significantly lowers its own standards of success or the market suddenly develops a massive appetite for first-person parkour all over again [Music] thank you for watching our video our documentaries are crowdfunded and made possible by your continued support for us we'd like to thank by name the generous patrons who have pledged to our highest rewards here Caleb she's kovitch daddy top-secret zone mu movies.com jefferson dos santos Olivera Maktoum saeed al maktoum nic team or tortoise bake-off if you enjoy our content please consider subscribing to our channel and joining us on patreon thank you

Channel: GVMERS

Views: 284,621

Keywords: DICE, Battlefield, Mirror's Edge, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Mirror's Edge 2, Mirror's Edge 3, Gameplay, 4K, History, Documentary, EA, Electronic Arts, Parkour, Free Running, The History of Battlefield, The History of DICE, Speedrun

Id: hqxFf97twoY

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020