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Neither scene has any of the assassin-shooting, grunt-stomping protagonist violence you’ll come expect from the rest of each respective piece, yet this is about as thrilling as either gets, proper heart-in-mouth, heart-out-of-mouth, oh-god-I’ve-barfed-my-heart-out-in-excitement action. It speaks to a peculiar part of our brains – escapism’s a word you hear a lot when it comes to games, but recently we’ve started to think that they’re rarely as good as when they’re taking that word completely literally.
Look at Alien: Isolation (opens in new tab). That effervescent emotional mixture of not knowing where the Xenomorph might be, having the tools to find out but just not wanting to know – followed by desperate hiding sequences, mad dashes for a new, safer space or acid-flecked death – is a powerful thing. Far more powerful, it seems, than turning round with a gun and instantly reducing the thing to extra-terrestrial casserole meat.
We’ve seen this before, of course. Mirror’s Edge let players move around its world in ways they never had before, making escape from its guards both more viable and more fun than attacking them, and it looks set to do so again in the sequel (opens in new tab). It’s no surprise that forced combat sections came away feeling like misguided bobbins – they were contradictions, you couldn’t help but feel they’d been jammed in there by some gonk in a suit terrified of releasing a first-person game that shunned murder for that core, that literal escapist attitude.
That’s an attitude I think we will – or perhaps should – begin to see proliferate on Xbox One. Where escape sequences have traditionally been among games’ dullest moments, requiring little more than QTE prompts or an analogue stick jammed upwards, the opportunities offered by bolstered tech could see these moments become more dynamic.
Titanfall’s gentle parkour was the first logical step – make traversal freeing and fun, and people will want to use it as much for pleasure as for the tactical upper hand. Alien takes it to its next extreme – don’t just make flight fun, make it essential. Xbox One’s hefty gubbins allow for so much more play with the dynamics of light, sound, memory space and artificial intelligence than devs have had access to before. You’re not playing with a rolling boulder stand-in in a corridor anymore, you’re acting out dynamic cat and mouse chases that require clever, intricate movement, non-violent tools and an adrenaline gland equipped to deal with multiple bursts of high-power heebie-jeebies.
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In a way, it offers the option for more power to the player, despite their vulnerability. In a shooter, you rely on your guns, your ammo, and whatever perks you might have equipped. In a well-created ‘run-away-‘em-up’, your own ability to discern where a noise came from, how a light moved or where you need to be next are tools you bring yourself. The opportunities are there, the consequences could be thrilling – we just need to, ironically, stop running away from them.
Click here (opens in new tab) for more excellent Official Xbox Magazine articles. Or maybe you want to take advantage of some great offers on magazine subscriptions? You can find them here (opens in new tab).
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The Mirror’s Edge reboot will be an “open-world action adventure game”, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau said today during the publisher’s E3 2013 analyst call (via CVG). The executive made no further mention of the game, other than to say there’d been a terrific fan reaction to Monday’s news that protagonist Faith is returning in what has officially been described as an “all-new origin story”.
In a recent feature called Mirror’s Edge 2 – 15 things the sequel needs, we said: “Mirror’s Edge 2 may benefit from an open-world aspect, allowing us to see the entire City in between missions, perhaps wandering off the beaten path for acrobatic side quests. Ancillary missions and other urban intricacies could be buried throughout the place, we just need the linear leash to be taken off. We want to go to the City limits, so let us!”
Gibeau also said today on EA’s analyst call that the company plans to release 11 HD and 14 mobile games in fiscal 2014, down on the number of titles launched in the past two years as the company continues to execute on its “fewer, bigger, better” software release strategy. However, the exec said EA’s release rate “will increase going forward” as the next-gen kicks in, noting: “There are probably about five or six new IPs that are fully owned and we haven’t announced yet.”
The EA Labels boss also discussed the company’s move to sign a console exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Respawn’s Titanfall. While he said EA has “a very balanced portfolio” across both Sony and Microsoft platforms, Gibeau explained: “There are tactical opportunities from time to time on a title or on a service component that we do enter into a relationship with one or two of the first parties on that particular opportunity and we’ll execute on it. Titanfall is an example of that. It’s a product that came in through our EA Partners group, it’s a partnership with Respawn, and there was an opportunity for Microsoft, EA and Respawn to create a tactical opportunity to make Titanfall exclusive to Microsoft.” Titanfall will hit Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC in spring 2014. In a recent opinion piece, we argued that exclusivity will be the key battleground between Microsoft and Sony in the next-gen.
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