Patrick Soderlund says Electronic Arts was always going to make a sequel to Mirror’s Edge, it was just waiting for a console generation powerful enough to bring its vision to reality.
That sequel to Mirror’s Edge that you’ve wanted so badly for so long but, until E3, never really believed you’d get? Apparently it was always going to happen – and boy, don’t you feel silly for thinking otherwise? – but EA’s plans for the follow-up are so mind-bogglingly amazing that it just couldn’t bring them to fruition on the laggard technology in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
“We’ve been looking at Mirror’s Edge for many years and had small prototype teams and incubations around what it could be. But it wasn’t until Sara Jansson, who is now the producer on it, came to me and called Karl-Magnus Troedsson and said, ‘Listen, I have an idea for what this could be’. She presented a vision so inspiring that we were like, ‘We have to build this now’,” EA vice president Patrick Söderlund told CVG. “The interesting part is that it was a game that could only be built in gen 4 and that was cool. I liked that because what they’re doing, it’s not possible on the current generation.”
“So that’s when I knew that we had something and spoke to EA. The support inside the whole company on Mirror’s Edge has been tremendous,” he continued. “We sold about 2.5 million units with Mirror’s Edge and people haven’t even blinked at it – like, ‘Of course we’re going to make a new Mirror’s Edge‘. The whole company has been behind it.”
Söderlund also dropped yet more hints suggesting that Mirror’s Edge 2 will be markedly different from the original. “Listen, if you do the same thing again then it’s not going to work. You have to be very, very honest with yourself and look at what went right and what went wrong. It’s obvious that people loved the art direction, loved Faith and loved the idea of what you did in the game,” he said. “I think we missed completely on the game being too difficult, people keep falling down and the notion of constantly running away wasn’t maybe greatly perceived… What I can say is we’re taking more of an action adventure approach on it than maybe before. First-person, running predominantly… This will be more of an action adventure game, but true to what the first one was to a large extent.”
Would it be cynical to suggest that I don’t completely buy the idea that EA was waiting for a great leap forward in console technology before it could bring a new game to life? There’s no way to know, of course, but Dead Space came out just one month prior to Mirror’s Edge and it’s already had two sequels. Make of that what you will.
Source: CVG
