DICE: Don’t Expect Mirror’s Edge Catalyst To Have Too Many Story Connections to the First Game

Mirror’s Edge is finally getting a new entry with Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, which launches next year, but if fans are hoping for the mythos from the first game to be expanded and iterated upon, they may be in for some disappointment- DICE has made it very clear that the new game is a re-imagining of the original game and its story in every way, to such a degree that it skews closer to being a reboot than anything else.

Speaking with Gamespot, the narrative director for Catalyst, Christofer Ermgard explained some of the changes.

“People who have played the first game will recognize some elements, but for Catalyst, the city is new…” Ermgard promised. “We are doing something that is new; it’s different and separate from the first game. You will recognize maybe the names of some characters, but they will be different characters in this one. Sometimes we even have the name and the look, but the character, what they do is still different, so there are some carry-overs in terms of ideas.”

He also discussed some of the changes that have been introduced with regards to the protagonist, Faith,

“Her personality now is more fleshed out. The game is about her personal journey, I would say. Of course there’s this big plot about getting involved against oppression and all that stuff, but the more important story is her journey, who she becomes and where she starts out and what happens along the way to make her into the person that she is.”

“In the first game, there was not that much of her personality,” Ermgard continued. “I didn’t myself feel like she went through any large change throughout that game, and so the person she is there is maybe more or less the person she is now… But now she’s even more fleshed out, and there’s more of her. There are more events in her life that explain who she is, and this is, in a way, a coming of age storyline, in that she will come to understand the impact that she has on the people in this society around her. She’ll start out her journey a bit more careless, a bit more selfish, a bit more immortal and then realize along the way that’s not the case, and I think that transformation people can hopefully relate to.”

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst launches on Xbox One, PS4, and PC early next year. Stay tuned for more coverage.