DICE on rethinking Star Wars: Battlefront, Mirror’s Edge 2

Star Wars

Star Wars: Battlefront, according to EA games label president Patrick Soderlund, will be the first of EA released Star Wars games that aims to rethink the Star Wars universe, in an interview with Polygon. According to Soderlund, “The most important thing for me is that we take the Star Wars license and come up with games where peoples’ jaws drop. We need to do with this what [Batman: Arkham Asylum] did for the Batman license.”

When pressed, Soderlund confessed he did not know much about the game, other than that it was being developed by DICE, the creative heads behind Mirror’s Edge and Battlefield. “It’s going to take awhile,” he said. “We just announced the license and showed a sneak peek of Hoth. The speeder and the AT-AT will be in [the game] for sure.” He also made mention that he did not think DICE was originally interested in Battlefront, saying, “I didn’t think [DICE] wanted to build it. I thought they only wanted their own IP. But it’s a really good fit.”

Finally, Soderlund also made mention that DICE was not scrapping any previous work on Battlefront, saying, “We didn’t toss anything out…but we want to take our own stance.”

Mirror’s Edge 2

However, Star Wars isn’t the only thing DICE has been working on. Recently announced at E3, Mirror’s Edge 2, the sequel to the cult classic Mirror’s Edge, was something that, according to Soderlund, couldn’t be achieved on current generation consoles. According to Soderlund, “It just happened to be a game design that I don’t think you can build on an old-gen machine. It doesn’t work the way it’s designed. And that also appeals to me. We could maybe get it to work on one, but we would have to compromise on too many things. With this we didn’t have to. It’s a true next-gen idea, with next-gen execution and that felt right.”

Soderlund also explained why it took so long for Mirror’s Edge 2 to get off the ground, saying, “We have worked on the next Mirror’s Edge with a small group of people for a long time, and different groups of people for a long time. We got to a couple of concepts that looked promising but in the end we stopped making.”

According to Soderlund, it wasn’t until Sara Jansson, senior producer, presented her vision that the game really took off for DICE. “”It was something that I just looked at and said, we have it, let’s do this. It wasn’t so much the story, even though that’s very important, but it was about the game and how the game was going to be played and what you can do and what Faith does. It amplified the things that were good with Mirror’s Edge and downplayed the things that were bad in a very natural cool way and combined it with a bunch of really inspiring cool things.”