Mirror's Edge Catalyst

henke on 13/8/2015 at 10:12

Just because it's been around for a while doesn't mean people have to like it. I hope there'll at least be an option to disable 3rd person takedowns.

And what do you mean by "redundant to moan about it"? The vocal outcry against 3rd person takedowns in Thief ended up resulting in them getting cut down significantly, so it's not unheard of that whining about them online might actually do some good. To that end I'll join Faf in saying BOO! DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING! AT LEAST MAKE IT OPTIONAL!

Tony_Tarantula on 13/8/2015 at 11:54

Quote Posted by henke

I don't think you understand around here. Gamers do NOT question the hive mind, ever.

henke on 13/8/2015 at 11:59

oh but I DO understand around here

I understand around here MUCH GOOD

Pyrian on 13/8/2015 at 12:17

Quote Posted by EvaUnit02

This "criticism" was run into the ground whilst discussing DX:HR.

As long as devs keep thinking this stupid "feature" is a good idea, the horse needs to keep getting beaten. It's worse than pointless, and Mirror's Edge 1 did a great job without it.

Quote Posted by EvaUnit02

It's been a common place feature since at least whenever God of War 1 came out...

...Isn't that series straight-up third person? :confused:

Starker on 13/8/2015 at 12:53

Pretty tired of games grabbing your camera to show you things too. You'd think Half-Life would have taught people how to do set-pieces properly.

Pyrian on 13/8/2015 at 13:25

That, I have to sympathize with the developers on. When big shit starts going down in an FPS like Half-Life, who stops and gawks? I suppose there's the scenes where they grab the player rather than the camera. Normally I bolt into the deepest cover I can and cover the entrance with a shotgun, missing the scene entirely.

Starker on 13/8/2015 at 13:59

I have no sympathy at all. Grabbing your camera to show you something on the screen is bad enough, but doing that in the middle of a fight is even worse. Drawing the players attention with sound, movement, colours, composition and level design is a much better way of doing things, as far as I'm concerned. Even if that means that a percentage of players may miss it. Dark Souls is a very nice example of a game where the players' attention is naturally drawn to objects of interest without most of them even noticing that they are being manipulated.

Starker on 13/8/2015 at 15:12

For example, suppose that you have a train passing the player and for some reason you definitely want the player to look at the train. One way to do it is to stop the gameplay and grab the camera to show the train. The other way is to draw the player's attention with the train making noise and setting the scene such that the player is prone to notice the moving train just as they enter the location.

IMO the other way is much superior because...

a) Stopping the action and taking control away from the player can do a lot to ruin the immersion. In the second case, it feels as if the train is a naturally occurring thing in the game world whereas in the first case you're taken out of the experience to essentially watch a minicutscene.

b) The player may be interested in watching the train the first time, but likely doesn't give a damn about it on subsequent playthroughs. In the second case, the player is free to just ignore the train and continue playing uninterrupted.

c) If you're stopping the game in the middle of gameplay, you're breaking the flow of a game. In the second case, the player has time to finish or stop on their own accord whatever they were in the middle of doing, making for a more natural breaking point.

Thor on 13/8/2015 at 16:38

Quote Posted by Starker

I'm on board with having optional 3rd person takedowns as well. Taking the player's view for a brief moment, to highlight the topic of a conversation is only normal. It works very naturally with Mirror's Edge, cause it does it when Faith is talking with her boss/partner about the object she briefly looks at.
- Do you see it, Faith?
- [Camera grabs for 2 seconds] Yeah, I see it.
This makes the player better visualize their goal. It is in many games where you don't get a look at where you're going and instead passing random locations where it is stupid and devoid of any realism and logic [so this one convoluted path just happened to take me to my goal (Spec Ops: The Line and the Jedi Knight games comes to mind, but countless other games to that too)]. Anyway, if it didn't grab the camera, they would have to do the conversation differently, but since this works super well and adds just little bit of more diversity to the game, I don't see any reason why not do that.

I rambled on too much again, but bottom line: it's a choice of style and it fits Mirror's Edge very well.

Demo looks like what I was hoping for. I hope the red colored optimal path element will be optional (if I read the PC gamer article right it looks like it will be). In fact, I don't recall seeing any in the demo, where I thought there should be (like the pipes she was climbing, for example when she made the ballsy jump at 3:15. I still don't know how to feel about the collectibles (and there are apparently various types of them?) as they may slightly ruin the panorama (and smaller-scale location) shots. Then again, there's your motivation to go get them, lol. How witty indeed. If they do spam them around, I hope they'll make some of them really challenging to get to, make you use some creative thinking or pull a great stunt to get them or something along those lines. Yeah, definitely the game I am looking forward to the most.

Starker on 13/8/2015 at 17:16

Quote Posted by Thor

Taking the player's view for a brief moment, to highlight the topic of a conversation is only normal.

Not for me. Especially not in the middle of movement. For me, it feels like running into an invisible wall.

And you can draw the player's attention in lots of ways without taking the control away from them. For example, let's say there are two hostile NPCs standing on a nearby roof. Instead of the boss/partner going, "Watch out for those guards down there", and Faith stopping, grabbing the player's camera and going "Oh, these guards", you could just have Faith remark to the boss/partner, "I don't like the look of those guards" when Faith is close enough. The player will naturally stop and look around at that point, because it's a hazard. Having a conversation partner is a good excuse for the character to make such remarks as well. Or you could just have characters that talk to themselves, like in the Thief series.