Friday Pragmatism | EA/Dice’s Mirror’s Edge

I’m still not writing much at present, not here nor in vroenis but I’ve learned not to force it. Nevertheless for the sake of the exercise, Friday Pragmatism must live on!

Some notes on Mirror’s Edge which I’m yet to complete, but I feel have played enough of to give a fair assessment. I know it’s an old game but it presents some very interesting design issues that are fun to discuss. A lot can be learned from the game, both from what it does well and from what it doesn’t.

There’s a lot to love about Dice’s offering, the least of which are the crisp and unique visuals. Rarely have I ever seen urban environments rendered so well in the in-game engine. The look of the game is very important to the atmosphere and even the sewer level had moments of visual flair. Almost everything in the game looks amazing.
The audio-design and soundtrack are also amazing, including Lisa Miskovsky’s theme song which fits nicely in the game if not her own discography. I adore the soundtrack, in particular the ambient sounds that play as you’re running towards each level’s climax, and the faster pieces work well with the energy of running away from them. From the moment the menu boots up, the music and lean menu-design create a wonderful first impression. After seeing the demo at a friend’s place years ago, I downloaded it just so I could hear the main music theme on demand.

Being a game all about parkour, the emphasis is on movement. Make no mistake, when Mirror’s Edge gets it right, it feels fantastic. Running through the rooftop micro-environments and nailing leaps, slides and swings feels great when you can chain them all together. The first issue that crops up is that even doing this on a basic level can be frustrating;

– Button input windows are vague and do not seem consistent, particularly close to edges and while hanging from poles.
– Auto-clipping ranges are unreasonably narrow.
– The game doesn’t seem to have been play-tested by anyone outside of the development team.

If I leap at a pole in real-life and look to reach it with my nose an inch from the actual pipe, I’m fairly certain that I’ll have no problem taking hold of that pipe and successfully latching onto it. Mirror’s Edge demands that your reticule be in the very dead-centre of anything you wish to take hold of and will drop you to the ground (and instadeath) if you’re anything more than a few centimetres off. Not only is this a poor design decision from a gaming perspective, it’s also grossly inaccurate to real-life dynamics. Given some flexibility about reality (more on that coming), I’m fairly certain that in real life, depending on the distance from leap-point to pipe, the natural margin for error could be anything up to a whole meter, essentially just less than the reach of your arm measuring from the centre of the torso. Either the clipping window is too narrow or the execution in the coding is inconsistent because truly, you will nail jumps that you perform exactly the same way and think you’re heading towards instadeath, and then fail ones that in fairness have successfully followed-through before. The same issue crops up when attempting to zip-line across a gap; sometimes you will successfully hit the jump button and clip onto the wire, and other times you’ll simply jump up and down stupidly as if you’re attempting to get the attention of your enemies or worse… fall to your death.
It seems that Dice have attempted to increase the difficulty by forcing you to nail every action with precision, much like parkour is in real life. I understand and appreciate that practice is a part of mastering any game, but this particular game isn’t paced well enough to slowly ramp up the number of actions and inputs that will be required. You simply have to fail at them time and time again, leading essentially to trial-and-error gaming, and even worse, random successes and failures.
The main problem with trying to make a game like real-life is that it’s just not fun; as in something that is rewarding in real-life, like endless hours of practice, repeating the same actions over and over, increasing confidence and having true peripheral vision and feedback in the real-world to help you develop your parkour skills are not things that can be replicated in a game. I guess you could ask gamers to invest two years honing their skills before letting them loose on the campaign, but I imagine that no-one would really be interested in that; after-all, you could just invest that time in the real thing. So we accept that games are for fun and they make things like shooting guns with remarkable accuracy and leaping from ledge to ledge a whole lot easier – the skill-establishment phase is totally disregarded and we’re given a shortcut to the playground. Mirror’s Edge simply doesn’t work consistently enough to make it fun, at least not at first. The game places you in the role of an elite free-runner, yet when you play you feel like a clumsy cow trying to walk across a tightrope. Suddenly all of that visual flare and brilliant sound-design counts for almost nothing. As Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has mentioned before, you can’t see your feet. I would suggest that with a little practice, you can actually become pretty good at gauging when to leap from the ledge, but at times the game demands you to be almost pixel-perfect with your jumps otherwise fall to your death, and it can be extremely difficult to nail that jump within the millimetre of perfection demanded; input too early and fall, input too late and you’ll pleasantly drop to the ledge immediately below you… or to your death.
There are some more practical problems with inputs as well. For the most part, the Left Trigger for down actions (slide etc.) and Left Bumper for up actions (jump, vault etc.) works fairly well, until I came to the cross-bar/pipe swinging. This element in the demo was actually what prevented me from purchasing the game at launch, because up until that point, I was perfectly willing to endure its imperfections. The cross-bar was the final straw in the demo for me. It is unclear whether I have to press the up-button after jumping in order to clip onto the cross-bar – these days I do it anyway just in-case, but I swear sometimes I’ve auto-clipped before a late input and it’s still worked. The problem with that is that if I’m too late then my button-press will release me to fall to my death. Nevertheless, the idea is to swing from the bar and leap forwards. Once again on the reality issue, to me, I would naturally want to press the down-action button in order to release my hands, and I’d want to do this just after the trough of my swing to catch the movement of the upswing. The game however demands that you wait until the zenith of your up-swing and then press the up-action button. This to me makes sense. I cannot jump or add any leveraging force while holding onto a bar, so the up-action makes no sense to me. Further-more, if I let go of a bar at the highest part of my swing just before the back-swing, I believe in fairness that I should plummet directly down to my death but for once… it doesn’t happen. Miraculously and illogically, there is a pause at the zenith, the button-press, and then a bizarre flight forward. That remains to be my biggest problem with the movement dynamics and inputs, and while I’ve learnt to do it the way the developers wanted me to,it took an unreasonable amount of trial-and-error; not only to figure out how to overcome this element that is not even intended to be a problem, but to commit one of the worst sins in gamer/development syndrome; remove myself from immersion to try and understand the contrived way that the developers have coded the mechanics. This is a massive crime to commit, particularly when there is such an emphasis on natural movement leveraged by the up and down-action buttons.

We’ve not even begun to mention combat.

The double-edged sword of reality comes back to bite us again. We’re forced to accept that parkour is supposed to be hard, with an emphasis on real precision. Then come the guns. All of a sudden there is an unseen but nevertheless blatantly obvious energy-bar, with inconceivably impotent weapons and incompetent police officers and soldiers to go with it. This fragile little free-running courier with stylish shoes and trendy clothing suddenly turns into a bullet sponge. It doesn’t matter that the number of bullets you can absorb is quite low, I still say that one shot-gun blast to the face at anything inside ten meters will seriously mess you up, so much so that you’ll probably loose consciousness or die. At that point, continuing to run up to the soldier and miraculously disarm or beat him down with superhuman ability is simply absurd – absurd already without his three other buddies firing away at you.
Combat itself can be strangely rewarding when you aren’t being killed, but the emphasis on a special slowdown and disarm ability doesn’t work due to poor implementation. The input-window for the slowdown button is unreasonably narrow and most button-presses will trigger the slowdown, but not allow you to disarm, allowing the soldier to continue to fire away. Then there is the issue of the slowdown ability recharging, the timing of which is vague.

In the form that it is or was released, combat has no place in this game.
It is awkward and unintuitive, frustrating, and serves as an incomprehensible interruption to what should have been the joy of movement and motion. The challenge of the game should be derived from speed and assessment of the environment, not unintelligent combat. Like many games, the skills you establish to overcome and enjoy the greater component of gameplay simply do not work in combat – at least the inputs in Mirror’s Edge aren’t entirely different, nevertheless they simply aren’t fun. Having mastered the art of movement, it feels like a kick in the guts to then have a death that makes no sense in the flow of the game.

I won’t mention the story because as uninspired as it is, there are worse stories in games and naturally the most reward from a game comes from the interactivity component. We all agree that stories in games don’t have to be bad, but if the gameplay is good enough, it doesn’t really have to be that good either.

The reason I suggest that the game wasn’t play-tested by anyone outside of development is that if it had, the ambiguous hot-zones for inputs would have been immediately revealed. As it stands, it appears as if it was only tested by people who already had intimate knowledge of the dynamics of the game and didn’t realise how illogical some of it is, and how poorly the game trains you in executing actions. This needed to be tested by people totally unfamiliar with the ethos of the game, fresh, and with no preparation, in order to gauge just how ambiguous the hot-zones, input-windows and clip-points are.
There are also some totally immersion breaking moments that would have been highlighted; in one section you are being pursued by enemies and thus encouraged to sprint as fast as you can with absolute priority given to nailing actions. Eventually you are led to an opening in the ground where you descend to the sewers, however upon landing on a suspended gantry, I ran to the edge, leapt-off and found nothing… falling to my death. I repeated this several times until entirely by accident I seemed to take hold of a cross-bar protruding from the wall – one that could not be seen from the first-person perspective when running across the gantry by virtue of the gantry itself blocking all downwards vision. I thought to myself – honestly? Am I expected to catch a pipe that I don’t even know exists? And with a mechanic that works only at random? At that point I had no idea where I was supposed to go so I swung and leapt… falling to my death. My successful navigation of this choke-point came about when I simply ran to the end of the gantry and stopped dead. While the enemies yelled and shot about me, the gantry slowly swung to the side to reveal a platform on-which I could easily jump-on, mind-you, also not visible as it is blocked by the gantry until it swings fully around. This is terrible design. The pressure is all on movement, and yet the solution to this problem comes from doing the opposite – stopping and waiting. That is truly horrible design.

Here’s the quandary. For the first three hours of the game, it seems like there is almost nothing to enjoy. It’s unreasonable and incomprehensible punishment after punishment, endless trial-and-error and interruptions to the flow of movement… yet at some point the movement begins to click. Less about you having confidence in your abilities, but you begin to recognise the pattern in the coding and mechanics and compensate accordingly. By sheer force of observation and implementation of strategies to overcome the weaknesses of the gameplay, you begin to move quite fluidly. It’s best at this point to go back and re-visit the earlier levels primarily so that you can get the feeling of flow and freedom of movement without endless combat interruptions. The later levels, gorgeous though they may be, are laden with rooms full of soldiers that you must fight in order to proceed. It’s a real shame because once you’ve overcome these challenges and hopefully completed the level, you’ll have access to these environments in time-trial mode, blissfully free of combat, where you can really appreciate the visual design. It brings me to a point many people have made that the time-trial mode is where the heart of the game lies which I pretty much agree with. What I don’t like is the necessity to play through the awfully contrived campaign in order to access it for every level. There is DLC for Mirror’s Edge in the form of a time-trial map-pack and after previewing it at my friend’s place, I eagerly purchased it upon finally obtaining the game late last year. The visual design of the DLC stages is gorgeous and regardless of my middling times when compared to world ranking, I still enjoy running through them and feeling the sensation of speed and movement.

This last discussion brings me to the final and perhaps near-fatal flaw of Mirror’s Edge. Perhaps its largest strength is also its most glaring weakness. The environments are visually stunning and from a progressively linear perspective, well set-up to facilitate what amounts more-or-less to scripted navigation. That’s fine, but what Dice have done is given us a decent toy to play with, but no real playground in which to play. There may be one or two areas where you have options as to how you wish to navigate, but they are extremely restricted and relatively small in comparison to the overall level. You may be standing on a roof and have three or four ways to get down to a yard (one of which is falling on your arse and taking damage), but that’s the extent of it. Regardless of what you can see upon spawning at the beginning of a level, there is strictly only one path to your destination, and the range of your decision-making is most often restricted to jump over a gap or zip-line over it. This game is screaming out for a wide and open environment in which to explore and navigate, slowly observing every detail so that the next time you fly through, you’ll know exactly what your options are. Even games with much narrower scope such as Crackdown had a great sense of exploration and play, it’s mystifying that Mirror’s Edge doesn’t. Take out the combat component or heavily modify it, and you could have a game with themes much more interesting and engaging, and movement dynamics that make sense.

At the end of play-time, there is actually quite a lot of reward, satisfaction and gratification to be gained from Mirror’s Edge, particularly in time-trials (though the necessity to be logged in to EA’s servers to do so is unreasonable. You should have the choice whether you want to post times online or not, though I imagine this was a validation/authentication tool built primarily for the PC and modded Xbox units). I’m amazed at myself that I endured such glaring flaws and pursued it to get to the fun; perhaps the brilliant visual design and movement, when it worked, were enough for me to see that there was something beautiful in there buried beneath such a horrendous and illogical mess, because there most certainly is.

EA and Dice seem to have made perhaps one of the worst possible missteps. They have created a game that when good, is very very good, yet is not consistent enough to provide the market at large with a positive experience; thus the product was punished when it went to market. EA recently have expressed interest in refining and extending the property, but is naturally hesitant to do so given its poor sales figures. Like I’ve been saying of late when playing Bayonetta where I can successfully despatch countless enemies but then be punished for failing an illogical QTE or fall due to movement and clipping errors with an instadeath, the better a product is, the more glaring its flaws will be, particularly when they seem so primary and amateur.

I want Dice to make another Mirror’s Edge, even with the shlocky story. I’m sure Dice want to, EA wants to and the fans want them to. We want the game that by rights the first title should have been; it’s a great property with a lot of great features and design elements – even the movement is half-way there. It does however raise the issue of iterative production. We seem to have paid for an iteration of a game half-developed and unfortunately this time around, it hasn’t paid off for EA. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for the property, even from those who upon trying it abhorred it and never purchased, simply because it has so much potential and looks so good. Personally I still don’t have much faith in developers establishing the disciplined required to polish a game with so specific a scope, they barely cope with even the most minute of complexity in either narrative or mechanics.

I can dream though. One day perhaps, before I die, there will be a truly great parkour game.