EA Games President Frank Gibeau swears to God he didn’t kill the sequel to Mirror’s Edge, he’s just trying to figure out how to release a sequel that will actually be a big hit.
Mirror’s Edge fans got a bit wound up earlier this month when the word went around that EA had pulled the plug on the sequel. Its failure to find a big audience made the planned follow-up something of a low priority and after EA rejected DICE’s pitch for the game, everyone working on it was reportedly reassigned. Things started to look up a bit a few days later, however, when DICE General Manager Karl Magnus Troedsson tweeted that the whole story had been manufactured out of “rumor milling, loose quotes and assumptions,” and now Gibeau has framed the situation in even less uncertain terms, flat-out denying that the series is dead.
“We’re just trying to figure out how to bring Mirror’s Edge back and in what way. That’s part of the creative development process,” Gibeau told CVG. “I know there are some stories about how EA killed Mirror’s Edge. Well, I’m the guy; I greenlight the games. I did not kill it – as God is my witness.”
“What we said internally is. ‘What do we need to do to make [the sequel] a hit?’ We need to go from version one to version two so that it sells two to three times as many, it finds a much bigger audience,” he continued. “The first game from a quality standpoint was good, but now it needs to be great.”
Mirror’s Edge was definitely a good game but not without flaws, although to its credit, many of those flaws were the result of legitimate risk-taking by DICE. The game broke two million unit sales, a mediocre figure at best, so the priority for a follow-up is to broaden the appeal. “We’re actively working on ideas in the Mirror’s Edge universe,” Gibeau said. “We just haven’t locked yet on a way to bring it back and a way that fans will be excited, but at the same time we can get it to a bigger audience.”
