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The PS3’s Cell processor has allowed Mirror’s Edge developer DICE Studio to “push the resolution of our textures much higher”.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com after his presentation to the world’s media at Sony’s recent PlayStation Day in London, Sean Decker, general manager of Battlefield developer DICE, said that the PS3 has “a lot of little quirks to it that we really like and our engineers love as well as our designers”.
In Mirror’s Edge you play Faith, a parkour-esque runner who leaps from rooftop to rooftop from a first person perspective. According to Decker, Mirror’s Edge will show gamers “a freedom of movement like you’ve never seen before in a FPS”.
During Decker’s on-stage presentation he said that “thanks to the incredible processing power of the PS3” DICE was able to make its “vision of what the game really is”.
When we caught up with him off stage to quiz him further on what the PS3 had allowed DICE to achieve with Mirror’s Edge, Decker replied: “The great thing about it is that there’s a lot of little things like, Faith there when she’s walking like this (points to Mirror’s Edge trailer showing Faith tightrope-walking across a beam), Sixaxis controls, super easy to implement and say, OK well just balance it and then you’ve got it there, as opposed to teaching a player to say, oh let’s push this button or that button.”
He added: “The other thing is the Cell really allows us to push the resolution of our textures much higher and we’ve taken full advantage of that as well. So there’s a lot of little quirks to it that we really like and our engineers love as well as our designers.”
However, Decker refused to go as far as to say the PS3 version of Mirror’s Edge will be superior to the Xbox 360 version, saying “each one is different”.
“The controls are different,” he said. “The other thing is the way the architecture in each one of the machines is different. It allows you to do different things with them and emphasise things, like let’s try a higher texture resolution on this one, and if you want to push the GPU or the CPU, and how the engineers want to balance out what’s most important in this game and how you want to bring that out in each one of them.
“At DICE we have lead engineers on all of our major platforms and they’re the ones who really architect it and say, you know what this is, what this platform is great for and this is how we’re going to bring it out on it. I wouldn’t say one’s better than the other. Again they have different quirks. It’s kind of like driving several different SUVs and saying one’s better than the other.”
Be sure to check out the rest of our interview with DICE’s Sean Decker right here.
Mirror’s Edge is scheduled for release on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
