Mirror's Edge Sequel On Hold 109
An anonymous reader tips news that Electronic Arts has rejected DICE's pitch for Mirror's Edge 2, halting development on the sequel to 2008's Parkour-inspired first-person action game.
"'Patrick [Soderlund - EA driving and shooting game boss] acknowledges that Mirror's Edge didn't match up to their expectations regarding sales, and that has stopped the sequel that has been in development,' declared the report, published originally in December. EA was shown a prototype, but declined with askance. The project has been stopped — involved parties at DICE are working on something else now. Patrick himself seems to have Mirror's Edge near his heart, but they are not in the business of charity.' Presumably the extra development is going into Battlefield 3 — EA's well publicized attempt at wrestling shooter supremacy from the Call of Duty series."
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
This is bullshit, Mirror's Edge was barely a game. We've seen the single player campaign fps thing a billion times, it really needs to go big! The sequel really would of been what it needed to deliver the first time around. Ah well another reasonably original IP, dies another shitty sequel is made.
This is why corporations are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
With one HUGE problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from all its strengths it suffered one HUGE flaw.
It had the flaw of the most extreme console platformers. The HUGE "how the fuck was I supposed to know THAT" flaw.
Some platform games have lots of hidden features or specials that can only be found through methodically exploring every last pixel of a level. The worsed (or best if you like this) of them even have in the main game play. Where your progress through the game is a constant Trial and Error approach with you NOT being able to do just get it right the first time because there was no way for you to know what to do.
You know the examples, the landing target you can't see until you made the jump meaning a fall to your death until you got the jump correct. The enemy attack that you can only counter once you know what it is.
Mirror's Edge looked a LOT like a FPS and most modern FPS give the player a different style of game. If you are good most of them can be played first time around without dying because challenges are about seeing the problem and then solving it. Not, oops I died WTF happened. Mirror's Edge was nicely done in the tutorial but pretty soon you were to often caught by guards while trying to figure out where the hell you were supposed to go to.
There is a reason Tomb Raider doesn't have so many guards running around while you are exploring. ME just forgot that there is a reason racetracks have got far more signs showing you were to go then a ordinary road. Because at 300+ km/h you do NOT want to have any surprises about the upcoming corner.
For many the game held a lot of promise but since it was all about speed its "run a bit, fall, reload, run a bit more, fall, reload" gameplay just wasn't it. It appealled to the kind of person who gets a kick out of memorizing a Mario run through. For the ordinary Maria player who just wants to run through a level it was to unforgiving and to obscure with where you were supposed to go while also constantly adding pressure so you never could just look around to see what the designer had in mind you do next.
That 99% of the time there was only one path didn't help either.
Re:This is why corporations are bad (Score:5, Insightful)