DICE's Mirror's Edge to put the "person" back in First-Person
Imagine Prince of Persia. Now, imagine it from a first-person perspective. That's the comparison Mirror Edge's senior producer Owen O’Brien makes when talking about DICE's in-progress acrobatic first-person game.
Acrobatic, you say? Now there's a first, eh? As Next Generation so rightly points out, providing the player with agility of any sort is almost entirely avoided in FPSes nowadays. DICE, however, hopes to change that trend.
“There’s always been a lot of focus on the gun in firstperson games,” says producer Tom Farrer, ruefully. “No one puts that much focus on the movement; how you move around the environment. We wanted to capture a real sense of physicality. Games like Unreal Tournament have movement – double jumps, rocket jumps – but it’s very abstracted. We wanted to place you in the world and convey the strain and physical contact with the environment.”
Ambitious, Tom. But what about the gun? What about the killing?
To that, Owen has an answer. According to him, the game is played more "through the character" and less "through the gun", something which I really think more FPS designers should keep in mind right from the get-go. The player character is an embodiment of you in a make-believe world. The guns are a means to spread hurt and death. However, the problem is, in most games the very point is to spread hurt and death, which is why weapons often take precedence over character.
Not counting the Metroid Prime series, which I will always respect for striking the perfect balance between exploration and shooting, most other first-person games have disappointed in the way of making you feel like you are the in-game character. If they can't do that, there's really no point of them being first-person is there?
The solution, apparently, is to focus on your body rather than your weapon.
“This is going to sound like typical developer hyperbole,” says O’Brien apologetically, “but when you play this game for a while it changes the way you look at levels in other firstperson games. You stop seeing obstacles and start seeing opportunities: ‘I could wall-run up there and jump there and do this and that’. Even on a very small rooftop everyone approaches it differently.”
“Doing the cool moves is relatively easy,” explains Farrer, “but you want to maintain a flow – that’s where the skill element is introduced. Coming to the bottom of the zip-line you want to time your landing properly so you can continue to maintain that speed and carry on moving, whereas if you fail you may stumble, slow down or even fall over.”
But enough quoting from me. If you like the little tidbits I've been throwing out so far, I'd recommend reading the entire interview over at Next Generation. FPS is, in my opinion, the most stale genre in the industry today, and any attempt to bring something new to the table is most welcome.
[ADVANCE]
