Activision and Infinity Ward Meltdown

[Terr]

Mirror's edge iffy. Mirror's edge need MP. Mirror's edge feel rough around the edges.

I decided to test this by borrowing and playing the game on normal difficulty. It has taken me only a few hours to finish, and a disproportionate amount of tha ttime was spent re-trying the same few seconds of gameplay for various reasons, primarily those related to (A) ambiguous "context-sensitive" controls (B) a badly-introduced combat system. (When leaping off a pipe, aim upwards from your destination.) A large fraction of the remainder was figuring out where the heck the game actually wanted me to go when I didn't already know Building X was over in a given direction.

The story was a strange mix of "predictable" and "unfinished". It needs MP because single-player is too dang short. While I have to give kudos for having the guts to try a first-person platformer, I fail to see what they did to actually solve any of the problems inherent in the genre. (The usual solution being "don't make it third-person".) The ending is bitter letdown.

The game suffers from the fact that your character's view is so strongly locked to your ability to move. While this is moderately "realistic", you spend all your time looking ahead and none of it enjoying the scenery or seeing alternate routes, especially when under pressure from enemies.

In the end, I think it's one of those things where game developers focused a bit too much on "realism" and "immersion" and in doing so lost sight of the fact that abstraction in games is part of what makes them work. (An example would be if someone made a "physics based inventory system" simulating trying to fit things into your pocket.)

 

[Leminnes]

Terr: I never had any of the problems you had. I enjoyed all of the gameplay and combat, while randomly included and not very well developed, was very minimal and most of it could be avoided by being an awesome ninja. Either way, obviously any game if you are play it for the intent purpose of being critical, you are going to find small or glaring faults and Mirror's Edge certainly had both of those.

BUT, there is one thing you can't deny, Mirror's Edge was an original idea. Whether you agree if it was poorly done or not, I have never played a game like it before or since. And personally, I enjoyed all of it (twice in fact.)

 

[Terr]

Thing is, I'm encountering some of these "die five times in the same spot" issues even on my second playthrough. There's this sort of unhappy medium between "all manual controls" and "fully automatic click to activate" where it comes out as "it does what you want except when it mysteriously fails and you die horribly and can't diagnose the problem". In some levels 95% is full-tilt running and 5% is "why-t-f isn't this working".

Anywho, any "being critical" came along naturally during the game. At first I was just going to praise the aesthetics, enjoy the sense of traveling anywhere...

 

[Leminnes]

Thing is, I'm encountering some of these "die five times in the same spot" issues even on my second playthrough. There's this sort of unhappy medium between "all manual controls" and "fully automatic click to activate" where it comes out as "it does what you want except when it mysteriously fails and you die horribly and can't diagnose the problem". In some levels 95% is full-tilt running and 5% is "why-t-f isn't this working".

Anywho, any "being critical" came along naturally during the game. At first I was just going to praise the aesthetics, enjoy the sense of traveling anywhere...

See, I know exactly what you're talking about. I had some of those issues as well, perhaps even more than once, yet I still enjoyed it. The stark aesthetic of the world coupled with the, in general, fast paced and quick-thinking logic of the game just appealed to me. And yes, I died many, many times, but it is a trial and error game. That is how it was designed, at least that's how it seems to me.

Either way, this wasn't supposed to be a discussion on the merits of the quality of Mirror's Edge or EA games. Whether you dislike them or not, EA has stepped up their quality in the recent future. They're not the "evil game company" they were portrayed as in the past because, it seems to me, at least they're trying. But of course, there is the sports games. Those suck, but they make EA money. So it's not like we can expect them to stop. I do wish 2K could make NFL games again, though.