Mirror’s Edge Catalyst: The World from Faith’s Perspective
2015-06-26
Electronic Arts
Why first-person is crucial to DICE’s vision
In Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, players experience the world through the eyes of Faith. That first-person perspective is important to DICE’s vision, and it’s why Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a first-person action adventure game.
“Playing in first-person is integral to Mirror’s Edge,” says Design Director, Erik Odeldahl. “At its core, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is about putting you in the shoes of a Runner and letting you live Faith’s story. She progresses from doing her job on the rooftops of Glass, to becoming a person that realizes she has the power to change things for the better for everyone. Seeing the world through Faith’s eyes and using her hands to interact with it is something we believe is absolutely necessary.”
DICE saw the first-person perspective as a no-brainer, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to implement. “You can’t just translate third-person into first and expect it to work,” Odeldahl says. “We’ve spent a lot of time getting the first-person movement right. We’ve also spent a lot of time creating a believable city for you to use this type of gameplay in. A city looks very different from the rooftops than it does from the streets. Where a lot of other games can hide things away from the player behind a wall, we seldom have that opportunity – the player sees so much from Faith’s vantage points, it has to make sense.”
The trickiest part of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’s perspective is tied to its landmark use of parkour—the art of getting to your destination as efficiently as possible, regardless of obstacles.
Practitioners learn how to vault, climb, swing, jump, and roll with grace and ease, and Odeldahl wanted to allow players to experience that skill. “I find it very inspiring,” he says. “There are no super-heroics involved, just well-trained people using their momentum and skills in the best possible way to traverse environments that weren’t meant to be crossed that way. That’s an analogy that carries over into the game: Most people blindly use roads and lanes to get where they want to. Faith doesn’t use roads. She always crosses them at a ninety degree angle, getting to places others will never see.”
To pass the feeling of freedom from Faith to the player, DICE has been extremely detailed in its motion capture process. “At the shoot, technically it is not that different,” Odeldahl says. “We still have a person in a suit perform the moves while we record them.”
But the team also has to consider a new set of factors to make the captured movements translate to the player’s first-person view. “The camera is attached to the actor’s head and we have to make sure that all moves read well from that angle,” he says.
“In real life, we are so used to using our arms and legs without looking at them, but in a game that just doesn’t work. You need to see what is happening. This is especially true when it comes to combat and doing things like skill rolls when you land after a long jump.”
Using first-person for a frenetic action game is tricky, but ultimately important to the game that Odeldahl and the DICE team are making. “Personally,” he adds, “I hope that people will play our game and be inspired to try it too.”
More on the world and gameplay of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst here.
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