‘Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’ Exclusive Interview: ‘The Social Playground’ With Jeremy Miller

Pulling off fast completion times during Time Trials always feels gratifying. What feels even more amazing is knowing there’s plenty of other online competitors who’re trying to match or surpass your score. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst feeds into these mechanics perfectly with its implementation of new “Social Play” features. In order to get a more thorough understanding of what this new set of challenges entails, we spoke with Gameplay Producer Jeremy Miller to learn everything there is to know about Social Play.

What are some of the Social Play elements that will be featured in the game?

We have quite a few! Dashes allow you to compete against the times of other players on along runner designed races, you can create your own challenges that will appear in a friend’s games. There are two types: Time Trials, which are a checkpoint race player create themselves and Beat Location Emitters (Beat L.E.s) which are a sort of Geo Tag you can use to create a puzzle for a friend or to show other players a cool or difficult spot you discovered a path to.

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How will the actions of one player affect the world of another one?

To start, many of the activities found in the city have leaderboards that allow your friends to see your times. Both the Time Trials and Beat L.E.s will naturally find their way into other player’s and friend’s games, but you can also share them directly utilizing our web/mobile companion app called,

Time Trials also feature your “Echo” – a custom augmented reality visualizations of you running the Time Trial. Plus, there are Billboards and various screens you can hack which places your custom runner tag not only onto them, but also onto the billboard or screen in your and your friend’s games.

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Will there be a way for players to search for the best Time Trials, Dashes and Beat Location Emitters challenges?

We don’t have a built-in searchable database, but using the Companion web/mobile app, called The Beat, you can create URLs of the content you’ve created and share it with anyone, so I suspect that lists will certainly become available. Additionally we have a system that brings popular or high quality UGC content into your game as you play, so you will definitely get to experience the best stuff out there!

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Has anyone on the development team managed to pull off a near-perfect completion time during a Dashes challenge?

We have some VERY good players on the team – one even held the world record speedrun time of the first Mirror’s Edge! So it’s taken them some time to balance the required for Dashes for us mortals. As for perfection? I’m not sure. One of the great things about the movement system is that there always seems to be a way that a Dash could be improved, even if just slightly.

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Were there ever any plans to include some type of competitive or co-op multiplayer modes?

We explored many different features and directions and we really feel that the offline competitive system we’ve gone with produces the best player experience for this game.

Buy Mirror’s Edge Catalyst here.

Buy the Collector’s Edition of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst here.

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