The executive vice president of EA Studios has said that the possibility of a new Mirror’s Edge title depends entirely on whether or not there is an appetite out there for Faith’s parkour-fused adventures.
Speaking with Polygon, Patrick Soderlund said he hopes the upcoming Mirror’s Edge Catalyst performs well at retail, though made it clear there’s no guarantee that a sequel will get made.
“There’s a lot of learnings that, should we not build another Mirror’s Edge for various reasons — a lot of the things that we’ve done will serve as great learnings for whatever else we build. As you know, EA is pushing quite hard as a company to move into the action space. A lot of stuff like going to an open-world structure, going to a nonlinear narrative, building out characters and stories — these are things that we need to learn and perfect as a company. Sometimes, you have to look at it long-term.
“I hope that Mirror’s Edge Catalyst does extremely well. But in a world where it may or may not do well, it’s important for us to understand that everything that we do needs to be seen in the longer perspective. You can’t just look at it in isolation. Whether or not there’s another Mirror’s Edge is going to be up to the people out there. If we can convince them that there’s a market for this, that people want to buy it, and if they tell us they want another one, then we’ll make another one. If the answer is that there wasn’t a big enough audience, it’s too difficult and too much work goes into making a game to build a game that we know people probably don’t want.”
This shouldn’t be a surprise to fans of the franchise, seeing as how the original Mirror’s Edge, released in 2008, didn’t exactly set tills alight across the globe. It did, however, enjoy a cult following, although its lack of commercial success resulted in EA stewing over the chances of a follow-up for years.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is scheduled for release on PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One in the U.S. on June 7 and in Europe on June 9. The game is not a full-fledged sequel to the original however, but rather, a reboot that focuses on Faith’s origins story.
Check out the launch trailer here.