Mirror's Edge Preview

Mirror's Edge, from the makers of the Battlefield series, is described as a first-person parkour-inspired action adventure game. We were still wrapping our head around that game-describing mouthful when DICE unleashed a brand new trailer, showing for the first time in-game footage in full flow. With the athletic Faith's exploits fresh in mind, we caught up with DICE's general manager Sean Decker following his presentation to media at Sony's recent PlayStation Day in London to dig a little deeper...

VideoGamer.com: I was at EA's recent Games Label showcase in London a couple of weeks ago and was wondering where the game was. Why have you decided to show it at Sony's PlayStation Day event, since the game is multiplatform?

Sean Decker: I think it was a good showcase as far as Sony's a great partner for us. Everything I said up on stage we absolutely believe in. It's just a great platform to play with and I think it really brings out a lot of things that Mirror's Edge is all about. It's an edgy platform, Sony's is a hit brand. The game isn't your typical let's get in the mud shooter that we've done in the past and so it felt like a really good fit.

VideoGamer.com: You talked in your presentation about how the PS3 was enabling you to realise your vision for the game. How much does the game actually push the PS3?

SD: The great thing about it is that there's a lot of little thing 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.

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.

VideoGamer.com: So is it a case that you'll be able to get more out of the PS3 in the future or are we starting to see the limits of its capabilities now?

SD: Oh no. If you look at the last, I've been around for two different console cycles now I guess, this is my third one, and it's always the case that the first several years everybody's exploring the bounds of it, and it's not until several years down the road that you're able to squeeze every drop out of it. Look at games like God of War. On the PS2 it looks brilliant. Try and do that game at the beginning of the PS2, wow, you would have such a hard time doing that. And the same thing's going to be true for this as well. Over the next several years on all the major platforms you're going to see all the developers squeezing every little bit out of it. It's going to be a while before you really push it to the edge.

VideoGamer.com: But exciting times for PS3 owners then?

SD: Yeah.

VideoGamer.com: The game is coming out on 360, PS3 and PC, and you've talked about how the PS3 allows you to do different things. Does that mean the PS3 version will be better than the 360 version?

SD: Oh no. Each one is different. Just because again the controls are different, that's the first start right there. The other thing is again the way that the architecture in each one of the machines is different. It allows you to do different things with them and emphasise things like well 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 it out, what's most important in this game and how you want to bring that out in each one of them.

So for us 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.