Producer InterviewIGN AU: Mirror's Edge certainly has the most believable first person perspective to date, but are there any areas you've identified that could help make it even more immersive? I found, for instance, that the fact that you're still using a thumbstick meant that movement was still a little jerky – how much can you smooth something like that out?
Tom Farrer: You always encounter this problem, and we definitely hit it in a few places with how good you want something to look and feel versus how playable you want the game to be. For instance, we have quite a lot of systems for her legs. We haven't actually used all of them – maybe we will at a later date, but one of them is that generally, if you have a body in first person, and most games don't, but the ones that do, you'll notice that the legs look a bit crap; sort of sliding and stuff when you look down and move around, and so we had a really beautiful system where she would move much more naturally, but the knock on for that was that you couldn't make microscopic adjustments because she would adjust a certain amount or degree.
IGN AU: You were waiting for the animation to play out.
Tom Farrer: Yeah, and it's tiny, but it feels really off, so we didn't do it. Well, we did, but then we removed it. So we've done that on a number of things – we've done things that are really beautiful or look really cool, but we decided that they just didn't feel right. For example when you're playing she can stop pretty quickly, even from a full sprint, and you can say 'well, that's not right, she should really have more inertia'. We tried that and it was just really really irritating. What else did we try? Bullets hitting you should slow you down, which we thought made perfect sense and would be really cool, but it was so irritating.
IGN AU: There's not much you can do if you're running away and someone's shooting you in the back – you can't dodge that.
Tom Farrer: Yeah, so if you got hit just before a jump or something you wouldn't make it, so that got scrapped.
IGN AU: Tell me a little bit more about the game's fictional city. What were your sources of inspiration in its design? I know the storm drains were inspired by Tokyo, but what other places did you look to?
Tom Farrer: We looked at a lot of places because we wanted this east meets west vibe, so we were looking at places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai… even whitewashed villas in Greece for style and tone, and quality of lighting and stuff like that. There's all kinds of influences. In terms of the way we wanted to build the levels and the area, we were looking at places like New York, which just has the fabulous kind of vertigo, but we didn't want a rigid, gridded system because it's quite restrictive, so then we were looking at Tokyo and it's got a more organic structure, it's also got a lot of height variation which makes for cool platforming, so we started pulling in elements from all of those places to create one location.
IGN AU: In terms of the totalitarian regime that rules over this world, were there any films or novels that inspired the story?
Tom Farrer: No, I think it's more just stuff that's going on in the world, all over the place right now. One thing is – it's not strictly a totalitarian regime or government there. People always latch on to something like that because it's quite a prevalent idea in games and movies. 'Oh, it's a tough government, they must be an awful regime like 1984 or something like that' but it isn't; the idea behind the city is that it's more of a nanny state that's just gone too far. So yeah, it could be anything, from the fuss over the introduction of ID cards, the regulation of the Internet, all of those kinds of things. We're seeing them all the time, whether it's national DNA databases or the fact that I'm being fingerprinted and having my photo taken when I'm getting off a plane.
IGN AU: It's definitely quite a stark world, but where are all the people? Are there going to be any more populated areas?
Tom Farrer: Well, looking down at the street, we've got traffic and civilians wandering around, but we don't do any direct, y'know, running through crowds of people or anything like that. It would be cool, but when you're looking at the stuff you're going to do you pick the areas that you're going to focus on, so we focused on the movement and working on the geometry in the areas, so while we've got little peds and people wandering around in the distance we never bring them super close to you. And she's generally in places that aren't going to be massively populated.
IGN AU: We've only seen a couple of areas in-depth so far, but we've also seen a little bit of a subway station and concept art of what looks like it could be a prison.
Tom Farrer: We didn't build that in the end.
IGN AU: Are there any other locations that you can tell us about? Anything that really shifts up the gameplay, that you're really happy with?
Tom Farrer: We've also shown a factory-type environment, and actually, that was an interesting environment to build. One thing is, looking at the way we structure levels, is we never want to have the factory level or the subway level or the whatever level. It's important to us that you move through different environments.
IGN AU: No lava world?
Tom Farrer: No lava levels or ice levels. So for example, with the factory level you start outside, up on rooftops, and you progress inside. Again, getting this height variation so you're moving up and down, and it feels more natural and fluid; like you're really progressing through. That was a really fun environment to make because it's a classic – it should be a classic generic game environment and finding ways to put things together that were really fast and fluid in terms of movement was really interesting. And also looking at how it ended up being art directed, with this powerful orange – it was really striking the first time we actually put colour into it... And later on we changed the environment again, but I can't talk about that environment. What we've aimed to do is build at least one completely unique environment in every single level, but in most cases we've managed to more than that. I'm quite pleased with that aspect of the game – that it keeps changing.
IGN AU: Do you actually build Faith's abilities as you go? Are there any moves that are locked off to you at the start of the game?
Tom Farrer: We didn't want to do this artificial 'now you've got your power jump boots' or whatever, because we wanted to let the player enjoy using the moves. The satisfaction from being good should come from being good, rather than from getting some magic belt that makes you run faster or something. It's always kind of a gamble, saying 'it should just be fun', without trying to augment it with all kinds of rewards and stuff like that.
IGN AU: So that just really comes down to the strength of the movement system and the level design.
Tom Farrer: There's quite a few moves and ways you can put the moves together that we don't ever teach you. Watching people play through, I think they started finding some of the first stuff by about level three. We also built in a lot of routes and ways of navigating the environment that you won't see when you're first starting off, because they need quite an advanced combination of moves, but what you'll find is, as you move through the game, you'll also be unlocking more time trial levels and stuff. If you go in there and you start downloading people's ghosts, you're going to start seeing 'ooh, I didn't know you could do that!'
IGN AU: Do you think that the 'Runner Vision' is likely to stop people from working that stuff out, purely because they'll follow the red path?
Tom Farrer: A really interesting thing that I noticed when we started sitting down and watching people playing through the game… we found that after, again, it was levels three and four, they seemed to be a kind of tipping point. By that time people had gotten quite comfortable with Faith and her abilities and they were starting to get more experimental and we started to see a lot more people just ignoring the paths that were being highlighted and trying other – usually more complicated and trickier – things, that wouldn't necessarily give them an advantage but because it was cool. So no, and you can switch off the Runner Vision if you want and on hard it's disabled intentionally.
IGN AU: Did you think about having a system where the Runner Vision only appears if it's clear that someone is stuck?
Tom Farrer: The idea behind it is that it's what it allows you to do as a player. If we disable it and we test it you start to see the pace people play and the way they play changes quite dramatically. Generally, people see red and red means go – they take far more risks and they play faster and have more fun, rather than edging up to every drop and thinking 'ooh, can I make it?'. Then, a nice, fast running stretch becomes more like – for a player that's not feeling that confident – becomes more of a puzzle, rather than something that they can just belt down really really fast and have that feeling of exhilaration.
IGN AU: You mentioned the time trial mode, is that the only other mode – aside from the main single player – in the game?
Tom Farrer: There's speed run as well. The time trial is broken up into short, more bite-sized segments, so it's easier to grind it and practice, and race other people's ghosts on. So your ghost gets uploaded onto the leader boards, along with your friends' and everyone else's, so you can compete against them. Whereas in the speed run that's full levels from the game. Like I was saying with the other routes, we built everything to be played very very quickly, but you just won't be able to do it that fast first time. I mean, we've seen 500% time improvements from first play through to speed run…
IGN AU: Have you set times from the team?
Tom Farrer: On the time trials and the speed runs we've set qualifying times. In time trial there's three, you earn stars depending on how good you are. The more stars you've got the better player you are. We actually got a bug back saying 'speed run on level nine is impossible', so we sent that back saying 'no it's not.' (laughs) 'You just need to play more!'
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