Based on the demo, Mirror’s Edge is one of those games that I really want to love, but in the end just end up respecting from a discrete distance.
As a milestone in the game industry’s development, it’s a great game. The visuals are refreshing, and the premise of a first-person game where the aim is not to have to shoot people is a welcome change. Technically, the impression of embodying a character who leaps and jumps and rebounds from every feasible urban surface is well realised, to the extent that when you’re hanging from a ledge and want to look around, you can see yourself let go with one hand in order to do so.
However, the choice of view also has some problems. Since in terms of mechanics this is mainly a platform game concentrating on finding and exploiting escape routes, I found the first-person view very restricting, because it cuts out all peripheral vision, when in practice being able to see what’s to either side of you, and above and below you quickly is absolutely paramount. I think if I was on a PC I might have found it less restricting, because I could use a mouse flick to quickly cast a glance around without materially affecting my runner’s trajectory, but with 2-stick control you can’t really do that, meaning the restrictions on the view meant it felt very much like I was occupying a small metal cockpit with a small front windscreen on top of a robot body, piloting it with a slightly clunky interface, rather than truly embodying an athlete. On relatively straight runs it’s ok, but as soon as you need to look around, it gets awkward and it’s all too easy to miss things in the rush, and have to fall back on repeat plays – you really need to know the level before you can leap around the more complex parts of it. I can’t help but feel that a third person view would have made the whole process of navigating through the world much smoother because it would naturally give you back that all-important peripheral vision, but of course that would have eliminated the major selling point of the game. Tough one.
Secondly, it makes me want to barf. All that bobbing around and (worse) forward rolling certainly does add to the atmosphere, but if you get motion sickness like I do, it isn’t pleasant. After playing through the demo in 30 minutes I had a raging headache and felt slightly ill – not quite the Penny Arcade result, but I can see where their inspiration came from.
Lastly, the platforming is pretty annoying at times. The game is highly unforgiving about grabbing on to drainpipes for example; if you miss it by 30cm or so you’ll be plummetting to your death pretty quickly. The restricted peripheral vision doesn’t help in this regard, timing jumps can be difficult when you can’t see your feet (of course, you can look down to see them, but then you can’t see where you’re going). Again a mouse would help here for quick glances, and perhaps with time this would become more natural, but I can’t help thinking that being a little more lenient with the jumping mechanic would make the whole experience a little smoother.I also have no idea why they chose to use the 2 shoulder buttons for jump / crouch, it feels seriously unnatural when you’ve been programmed to use the primary face button for jumping for years. Maybe they thought that it would feel more intuitive (top shoulder button = jump, below shoulder trigger = crouch) but in practice I found it hugely awkward and often ended up using the wrong one in pressured moments – a simple A to jump and B to crouch would have been much more natural and more consistent with other games. Not the control system I would have picked.
So, a very interesting game, but not one I’ll be buying, mostly because of the motion sickness aspect. If it wasn’t for that I’d consider getting it just because I like to support new ideas, but I would stick to the PC version so looking around to search for routes is snappier, and would alleviate the ‘boxed in’ feeling a little.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Oddly, although almost every FPS I’ve ever played makes me want to barf after 30mins or so, I played the Mirror’s Edge demo through to completion and felt fine. Whether I’d be able to play more than that or not is another matter, but maybe 30min bursts wouldn’t be so bad. I think I’ll probably end up buying it, when (if) I ever get bored of LittleBigPlanet…
November 10th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
I played the demo also and agree for the most part, though I don’t really get motion sick and so that part didn’t bother me as much (the rolls were still disorienting). I did run around and die a few times because I was being rushed (shot at) and didn’t have time to look around the level to figure out where I was supposed to go.
I thought the controls were a little awkward also, but hopefully they would be nicer after having used them for a while? At any rate, my guess as to why they didn’t use the face buttons is that they wanted you to be able to use the right stick to look around at the same time as crouching/jumping.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
You’re in a great position to show them what a peripheral vision technique would look like – add one to Ogre and change the face of first-person games forever!
[)amien
November 11th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I think you have some valid points altough I find the complaints about not seeing your feet a bit unfounded. I can’t see my feet when running or jumping either but that doesn’t make me trip all the time. Peripheral vision would be great…what is the big catch in creating such a technique? To me it seems like some games (mostly racing) already have something close to this effect with all the motion blur going on at the sides…couldn’t you just make the camera angle a bit wider? I may not have thought this through very well but I would gladly see someone realizing this!
November 11th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
“I think you have some valid points altough I find the complaints about not seeing your feet a bit unfounded. I can’t see my feet when running or jumping either but that doesn’t make me trip all the time.”
That’s because you can feel your feet, plus actually you can see the ground below you even when you’re looking forward, because your peripheral field of view is a lot wider than an LCD viewport. In a FPS you really don’t have a direct correlation between where you feet are and the edge of a platform unless you angle the view down, or play enough that you can program the offset from the bottom of the viewport to where your feet actually are into your head.
A wider FOV is one option, but it would also reduce depth perception which would have other consequences. Another option that I thought of was to make the view automatically ‘drift’ down a little when you near the edge of a building, a bit like how other FPS’s sometimes automatically align the view with sloping floors. But again this has a downside in that if you were looking to catch a rail to swing on, you might lose sight of that as your view drifted so you could see the approaching edge.
As I say, a third person view would resolve most of these problems, but it would then remove the USP of this game. I respect the stance they’ve taken – to really see whether it could be done as an FPS, and they’ve proved that it can, and it plays surprisingly well, but I have to say that despite the excellent work, on a pure gameplay basis (rather than a ‘pushing the envelope’ basis) the FPS view just doesn’t work as well for a platforming mechanic, and the free running in Assassin’s Creed while less revolutionary, was more playable.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I personally can’t stand 3rd person anything. I feel completely detached and uninterested.
I thought a first person game like this could work and from the videos it looks like they’ve done a good job. Any problem you can point out isn’t a reason to just make it 3rd person, it’s a reason to think of a solution
I also don’t think motion sickness can be avoided. FPS games also cause motion sickness in some people. Making a game disorienting is actually part of the game for me. I love how they kept the rolls fully first person. Not knowing exactly whats going on gets me into it and is a game in itself to get that orientation. For example I always play racing games cockpit mode, even though it’s harder to see. I guess you can’t please everyone
November 11th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Ok, I can buy the feel-argument in the sense that it might be easier to know where you are related to the spot your aiming for and therefore increase your sense of timing. But no, I can’t see my feet while running. Maybe I have damaged sight or something but unless I tilt my head I can’t see them. Perhaps I run too much like Michael Johnson.
About the loss of depth perception with wider FOV: This would be able to solve by some stereo technique right? I am not too keen on wearing those cardboard-plastic-glasses though.
We’ll just have to wait and see if someone starts a thread about this in the forums…
November 11th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
I get fairly motion sick as well on some games. It’s usually games with way too much “bobbing” while running or extremely confined spaces with lots of looking around corners. I forget the name of it now, but that small game someone did that was very similar in concept to Portal (with much less refined graphics and a different style in general) is the last one to make me pray for puke.
They say ginger is really good for it and I have found that “ginger beer” helps with it when I really want to play a game for some reason (*cough* Portal *cough*). If you’re not familiar with ginger beer, it’s like ginger ale on steroids (spicy and will clear the sinuses), and contains no alcohol.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:46 am
@Vectrex: horses for courses. Some genres work better with different types of view, and I happen to think platforming has been 3rd person for years for a good reason. Despite how well DICE managed to make it work first-person, it has to work extra hard and I still think it’s at a disadvantage. It’s an extremely interesting experiment and I applaud them for doing it, but I can’t see the genre as a whole going down this route heavily in the future.
@Kentamanos: Hmm, I’ve never tried ginger. When I’m travelling, I use ’sea bands’ – those elasticated wrist bands which apply force to a pressure point on your wrist. Yeah I know, sounds dumb, but they really work. I discovered them a decade ago after having travel sickness for years and not wanting to take pills anymore – I was super-skeptical but they really help; they don’t remove the sickness entirely, but they make it better and you also recover quicker on reaching solid ground (15 mins instead of several hours).
Funny I never get motion sickness in FPS’s though, Mirror’s Edge excluded.
November 13th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
elias is right.
jumping/ducking/using-/-activating…. all things that should be on shoulder/trigger/thumbstick-press-downs.
you shouldn’t have to stop looking around (ESPECIALLY when it takes so LONG to look around with most gamepad FPS control schemes) to trigger any of those actions.
i can’t play most FPS games on a console because most have the stupid defaults that have become standard for some mindboggling reason. while defaults have improved over the years, the standard FPS gamepad controls reminds me A LITTLE of all the whacky defaults the earliest (wolfenstein 3d, doom era) FPS games used to use.
and the fact that you can’t assign any action to any input is a mortal sin. these companies pour YEARS of effort into these games, but can’t be bothered with a day or 2 of making proper controller customization?!
one of the damn easiest tasks there IS in the coding world!
so their years of effort are totally wasted on people like me who can’t/won’t tolerate idiotic controls.
if only ONE coder had spent a day or 2 more.
*shakes head*
November 17th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Head-tracking could be a good approach in future. You may well have already seen this demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw using the wiimote for this purpose; there’s also a similar commercial product which is compatible with some PC games.
The perspective shift can be exaggerated, apparently with good results; so you might be able to move your head down by a few degrees to see your feet very briefly while still comfortably watching the screen.
This seems to have potential for being much more sympathetic to a console environment (ie, living room rather than desktop) than our beloved FPS mouse control. I believe it would do a lot more for immersion than stereo does – but you’d still need some sort of head wear.