What Mirror's Edge Catalyst Should Have Learned From Burnout Paradise

Hi. I'm Mark and this is Game Maker's Toolkit Mirror's Edge is one of those games that was crying out for a sequel. One that would polish up the first-person platforming, rethink the story, get rid of the guns, and just add a bunch more stuff. And, hey, we got it! Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a sequel - or a prequel or a reboot or whatever - and the controls are more responsive, the cutscenes don't look like they were made in Flash, the guns are gone, and there's way more content.

But, if the reviews are anything to by, it didn't quite work out. And I think the culprit might be one contentious change to the franchise: the introduction of an open world. The original Mirror's Edge presented most of its levels like an obstacle course. There was a linear route through the world and you had to build up, and then maintain momentum, by stringing together parkour movements over a series of springboards, fences, and zip lines.

You'd often see your route in front of you - highlighted in the bright red of Runner's Vision. But the challenge was to pinpoint that path while at top speed, to look for other routes that could be quicker, and to actually pull off the moves - the jumps, tucks, rolls, wall runs, and quick turns - with precision. And at other times, the game slowed down. Here, Mirror's Edge turned into a platforming puzzler where you tried to find a path up a tall tower, using a maze of platforms and obstacles.

As for Mirror's Edge Catalyst. No, actually, all that is true of Catalyst, as well. Because almost every story mission, and some of the side missions, take place outside the realms of the open world - in locations that are linear and intricately designed to be run through once and in one direction only. Those missions take place in skyscrapers, office buildings, underground facilities, and giant server hubs you can't access while free roaming. Which means the open world is relegated to other roles.

So it's a way to get from mission to mission, and a place to practice parkour. It's filled with collectibles if you're into that sort of thing, and it also houses a number of side missions. And so maybe these non-essential quests could actually take advantage of the sandbox City of Glass? If we want to understand how an open world can lead to gameplay that really takes advantage of having a large space to play in, there are plenty of games we can look at.

Games that give the player a huge breadth of options in how they approach a mission, or give them a feeling of mastery by repeatedly exploring the same locations. But considering the speed of Mirror's Edge, perhaps the best place to look would be a game like Burnout Paradise. Here's a super speedy franchise that successfully transitioned from linear tracks to an open world. And I think that's because every event takes advantage of the game being set in a sandbox city.

Races and marked man challenges send you from one side of the map to the other, and there are no limits on the route you can take. Road rage and stunt run events let you take down cars and rack up combo points in any way you wish and you don't have to worry about hitting dead ends because the city spills out in every direction. Because you're constantly racing over the same roads again and again, and all of Burnout Paradise takes place inside the city, you quickly start to learn routes and shortcuts, and know where to top-up your boost or cut a few corners.

Plus, every race ends at one of eight finish lines on the map, so you'll soon become very familiar with the roads and shortcuts leading to those end points. Mirror's Edge Catalyst doesn't really work like that. Side missions like dashes, fragile deliveries, covert deliveries, and dead drops are all point to point runs, but to arbitrary spots and on short, predetermined routes. And while there are often shortcuts that will give you a better time, they're usually just off to the side of that main route.

That makes it feel like the open world has been carved up into tiny chunks and at that point you might as well just put them all in a menu and call it Mirror's Edge. Because they ultimately feel no less linear than the races in the first game, which saw small sections of the main story levels turned into speed runs. As well as bonus, pure platforming challenges set in bizarre abstract worlds. Side Note: because Mirror's Edge didn't need to reload an entire chunk of an open world every time you fluffed a jump, it didn't have to have annoying loading screens during races.

Anyway. What you'll find is that the shortcuts in Catalyst's side missions are found much like they were in the original Mirror's Edge: through repeated playthroughs of that specific event, rather than from your overall knowledge of the City of Glass. Which will be, I'm willing to bet, very limited. And that's for a few reasons. One is that because the main missions don't take place in the open world, you just don't spend enough time there to learn the layout. Two is that the city has few familiar landmarks to help you navigate.

And third, which is the most important, is that the game is almost impossible to play without obsessively and blindly following this wispy red trail. Check out this video for more on how following little dotted lines harms your ability to engage with a game's world. You can tone down Runner's Vision or turn it off entirely but the confusing design of the city almost makes it a necessity. Strangely for an open world, the City of Glass constantly funnels you into linear corridors, where you're trapped between towers too tall to scale, or buildings too low to land on, or enormous gaps between rooftops.

This is good for giving you that classic Mirror's Edge feeling of flowing through an obstacle course but it's horrible for navigation. Especially between these big clusters of buildings that have just a few ways to get between them. So your floating waypoint thingy might be right in front of you, but the only way to get to it is to take a huge detour around here. This is likely a technical issue, to do with loading the different chunks of the open world into memory. But while gamers can put up with some hidden loading screens, it's harder to stomach when it starts to really impact the way you navigate the world.

What all this means is that Mirror's Edge Catalyst can't really provide missions like Burnout Paradise. Or, perhaps, Crazy Taxi. In that game you had a vague arrow pointing towards your destination and to make it under par time you needed both good driving skills and some knowledge of how the city was laid out. This could have been a fun mission type in Mirror's Edge where you would pick up and deliver packages from one side of the the open world to the other. It would provide a new type of gameplay to compliment the linear levels of the campaign - and test you on both navigation of the city and your ability to maintain momentum.

But I don't think it would work in the maze-like and fractured City of Glass, because you'd spend the entire time simply following that wispy red line, or just falling to your death. One thing that does work well is the way that players can make their own time trials, using any route through the City of Glass. That wouldn't really work in a linear game, like the first Mirror's Edge, where all the best bits have already been turned into races.

But would it be naughty to say that Burnout Paradise did it better by just putting leaderboards on every road so you're passively competing with other players and it makes you always want to race fast, take risks, and become a better driver? Or how the collectibles in Burnout were only ever about smashing through gates and billboards as you drive and not stopping dead in your tracks to open up a fuse box. And how mission givers don't just stand around like zombies but rocket past you and goad you into giving chase?

But, back to Catalyst. There is one more mission type that actually does take advantage of the open world. These security hub side quests see you beating up a bunch of guards, smashing up a tower, and then running away from a helicopter. Now, like the stunt run events in Burnout, you can just run in any direction, sprinting this way or that and taking any route you can to maintain enough momentum to outrun the chopper. There is no predetermined path and no specific direction, and any small understanding you have of the City of Glass will help you avoid dead ends and drops.

But, sadly, the best way to finish those missions is to just follow the red line which automatically routes you to the nearest safe house, where the chase is immediately called off. So close! Stuff like this shows that a Mirror's Edge game could utilise an open world. The mechanics are not incompatible with free roaming and, in fact, an open play space could lead to another style of mission to play. To compliment the linear and puzzle-like missions.

But many unfortunate choices - like the weird layout, the reliance on Runner's Vision, the short-sighted side quests, and the main missions being off in their own locations - all mean that this open world just doesn't quite work. In an interview, design director Erik Odeldahl said "I'm 100 percent sure that other teams within DICE, and other EA studios will learn and look at what we've done and probably use it in some way, especially when it comes to these big, big worlds".

Which should worry me. But seeing as how EA seem to have completely forgotten all the clever stuff they achieved in one of the best open world games they ever made, I don't think their memory is all that great. Thanks for watching! Lemme know your thoughts on Mirror's Edge in the comments below. I actually do like the game quite a bit, even if the open world was fumbled. Also, a quick note to say thanks for all the kind words on Boss Keys, which is my spin-off show about dungeon design in Zelda. I wasn't sure how that would be received, so I'm relieved that you like it. Link's Awakening is up next, as requested!

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