Why Faith’s open-world origin story is a balancing act only DICE can achieve
Scamper across a tall building, hop off the edge, land with a graceful roll, and keep going: Mirror’s Edge Catalyst makes something dangerous and exhilarating look oh-so-simple. Underneath the smooth, clean surfaces, however, lies a fascinating tangle of conflict. Style versus playability. Innovation versus iteration. Punching versus sprinting. Catalyst must appease whooping series fans, yet still offer something fresh. It has to retain the crisp, clinical design of the original, but provide players with an open world there to be explored, not admired. Not so simple.
Thankfully, senior producer Sara Jansson is on hand to outline exactly how DICE is managing this Faith-like balancing act. “It’s definitely a challenge,” she says. “Mirror’s Edge has a lot of fans, but we still need to create even more fans. That’s what we want. We want an even larger following, so it’s always a challenge to keep everyone happy. Some people don’t want changes at all – it’s just ‘give me the old game but more, because it’s perfect!’ – but the more we talk about it, the more it feels people are getting why we’re making the changes. They actually buy into it.”
One noticeable modification relates to the controls. As great as the first Mirror’s Edge was, it didn’t strike a perfect balance between agency and execution. You always knew what cool, acrobatic thing you wanted to do, but it often ended with an embarrassing tangle of fingers and a plummet to pavementsville. “It’s actually something we have focused on for this game, to make it a little bit less frustrating”, explains Jansson. “It’s a lot more responsive, and it just feels better. New players, after playing the first Mirror’s Edge and then playing Catalyst, are telling us in the first game they felt pretty crap at times, but now they feel pretty cool – like they can actually pull that thing off, and that makes me feel so awesome.”
Slicker city
Jansson’s point is proven during our first sprint through the pristine city of Glass. Everything feels more immediate. We still misjudge things, but it’s usually due to our own wobbling stupidity, rather than complicated, sticky controls. Faith is less cumbersome to handle, but the challenge is still there. “We want skilled players to feel a little bit more awesome, so there will be harder routes,” says Jansson. “If you’re skilled you could pull off a double wall run, and if you’re a newbie you’ll take a route around.” (We take the route around.)
So the balance is there for both veterans and rookies, but what about that new environment? The thought of an open world that still has to have the meticulous design of Mirror’s Edge is enough to make our addled brains liquify and trickle out our nostrils.
“Every object is something you interact with. You can’t make something just to be pretty, because you can’t use it for gameplay,” explains Jansson. “[Conversely], you can’t just place something for gameplay that might not work in that environment, because it doesn’t look like part of a real city. That process has been a big challenge. It ended up with us having people sitting with their desks beside each other – designer and artist.” Just as the physical process of designing the levels has changed, it requires a different approach to gameplay, too. This isn’t a rat-run of preordained checkpoints and clear instruction. The developer has to prepare as if you’ll plummet off the edge of every precipice, and introducing players to this concept is a gradual process.
“We don’t really have levels, it’s more just one city, but it changes over time,” says Jansson. “The area that you start in is a bit more forgiving, for example, so if you fall down there is often a catwalk or something below so you can just go up and try again. You have a chance to grind a bit and learn the movement system before having that experience.” It’s a world that has to accommodate the most unpredictable players, while still giving you the freedom to explore. More importantly, it can’t punish you for every failed jump or botched balancing act.
Initially, it’s a jarring concept. When faced with a city full of runny-jumpy opportunity, some quiet part of our brains asks ‘which way do we go?’. The simple answer is ‘anywhere’. There are missions in every direction, dotted around a clean map, and the result is something bold, if intimidating, and an initially baffling concept soon becomes fantastically exciting.
The whole city is a meticulously designed playground, but it alters how the game treats players. Where the first Mirror’s Edge could be an unforgiving experience, there’s no place for this in an open world. “We have to make it a bit less frustrating,” admits Jansson. “When you’re free-roaming and you’re not on the main mission, and you fail, or fall to your death, you instantly restart where you fell, so you can just try again quickly.” Great news for anyone inclined to dash off the edge of every building in the name of exploration.
Kicking glass
Matters become more complicated when you start thinking about Catalyst conceptually. Not only does the world have to be fun instead of frustrating, but having an open world is a crunching shift from the tight levels of the original. Again, Jansson elaborates. “Mirror’s Edge was about getting from A to B. Now, we can travel in all types of directions, and that affects how we design the world, but also how we work with movement, We had to learn basically how we design spaces to traverse different directions, and that took some time. It’s about getting the artists and the designers to work really closely together. Catalyst isn’t like a Battlefield game.”
It’s more than just perfect parkour, though. The section we experience is punctuated by sections of rapid, ceaseless action. It might not be Battlefield, but it certainly isn’t dull: we spend the first part of one story mission silently sneaking through an empty office block, but the stealth approach proves unsustainable. Towards the end of the section, the tone changes from gentle exploration to frantic getaway. Enemies block every path, and finding a serviceable escape route becomes a priority. Of all the parts we play, this is the most exhilarating; a rolling adventure playground of perpetual motion, which feels like playing tig with elite soldiers.
It’s never an option to stop and scrap with enemy forces, but nor is Faith helpless. You can chain attacks into almost every freerunning manoeuvre, so dashing wall-runs become aerial punches or flattening dropkicks. Best of all, doing so never interrupts the flow of the game. Instead, fighting becomes another part of your movement.“Sometimes you’re just moving through the environment, and then you get those action moments that up the pace”, explains Jansson. “I think the game needs that, and the intensity doesn’t need to be, ‘fight fight fight!’. We still have those action elements, even though we don’t have the shooting.”
Intense is certainly the word. There’s something irresistible and frantic about the combat. You’re always aware of what you’re doing, but the rapid, life-or-death fighting makes Faith feel like a dangerous animal; albeit a graceful one in trainers and baggy trousers. It’s pitched perfectly, feeling exactly like you expect her to fight – but it could have been very different…
Gun running
Instead of deftly-disarmed guards and a focus on agility, we could have got something far shootier. “We did have a kind of weapon system early, when we were experimenting. We thought ‘let’s use some kind of bullet time effect, but in Mirror’s Edge’,” says Jansson, describing something that sounds close to Superhot, but with wall running. Certainly not a terrible concept, but not a very Mirror’s Edge one, either. “On paper it was a pretty cool idea, and it works really well in other games, but in Mirror’s Edge it just felt really awkward.” This is a perfect example of how DICE is getting that balance right – always looking for ways to make Catalyst unique, without ever losing sight of what fans want. We’ll add it to the growing list of complicated things the Swedish studio makes look suspiciously easy. Matt Elliott
A smart update of a fan-favourite game, developed by one of the most talented teams in the business.