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by Fussbett 09/12/2008, 12:09am PDT |
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If there's any reason to not get down on Mirror's Edge, it's Charles. He worked on Assassin's Creed, a game that also featured climbing walls so for some reason he's disgusted by Mirror's Edge. But don't you dare mention that! He has completely independent reasons for hating this game and mentioning his hatred anytime someone posts a video.
After watching the video I just posted, what flaws stuck out in your mind? If you didn't say "the way it artificially fucks with your momentum" it's probably because you don't work in game development.
Charles
How To Go
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Posts: 11,558
Man, for a game that's supposed to be about momentum, it sure loves artificially fucking with your momentum pretty often. And given body awareness, you'd expect that you'd reflect off things, or that when your right foot is forward, you'd leap with your left foot instead.
Game looks worse with every video I watch.
Charles
How To Go
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Posts: 11,558
I guess you could say it's the guy's "mistakes" but in reality, seeing a raw playthrough shows a lot of problems with controls, their momentum system, and how linear it is.
The guy is a pro, and he still can't slide under things properly, and the game doesn't handle hitting things at less than the optimal angle properly.
For all their talk of momentum, for example, the guy is constantly overshooting, missing, and in general... blowing his momentum. If a middling player constantly has to stop, slow down, and line up his jumps and movements so they work? Oof.
Their talk of non-linearity and choice is laughable -- you can go up this structure, or this structure five metres to the left. That is neither non-linearity nor choice. It's like saying in Half Life you can choose to go left around a box in a hallway, or right around a box in a hallway.
The foot thing I was talking about, for the person who ninja edited their post, is that at about 1/3 through, you see the guy try and jump off a ramp... his right foot is obviously extended forward for running, and then when he jumps the right foot extends. Seriously, that's just lazy. It implies they only have one animation for each of their actions, which seems accurate, given that I see the exact same jump, slide, hand pass-over, climb, etc, in every video. It may not seem like much, but stuff like that seriously takes away from the believability and immersion of the game world. I also expect this is a side effect of how rushed the game is. The linearity probably comes of that as well.
On his big leap to the pipes, he fails to grab on, even though, for the most part, his initial jump was lined up -- there's no reason for this. The game should tweak your jump so that tiny shit like that doesn't happen. When he jumped, he was *literally* 3-4 pixels off target, and yet he missed his jump. That's unacceptable. Same with the second wall run, he starts just an instant too soon, and not only does he fail to complete it, but his character doesn't even bother to grab the ledge, even though he collided with it!
On the second door he passes through, he doesn't hit it perfectly in the center, and even though the door takes up most of the screen, he fails to go through it.
When he slides under the walkway, instead of aligning him with the path underneath (since he hit it in the center), the fact that he had a tiny bit of slide momentum causes him to slide diagonally (durr?) and then he hits a pole... which causes the player to just magically slide around it.
When the player slides in to the enemy, the enemy... bounces a foot in to the air. What?
And I'll save the best for last -- even though the game is about physically carrying packages so that the enemy can't intercept it, he picks up the package inside an enemy controlled facility.
For all of that, it was still just a two minute demo video. Urgh.
Charles
How To Go
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Posts: 11,558
I just see the problems because it's part of what I do, and from what I've seen, there are a lot of control problems, however I will grant that it's entirely possible that the guy playing just well and truly sucks.
However, a lot of this stuff is in all the vids. It's just even more obvious now.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=44274&page=10 |
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