EA talks lessons learned from Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge

Electronic Arts seems to have learned quite a bit about two of its more original games in recent years — Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space. I couldn’t tell you how many times those two have been brought up in interviews about the company’s future. Add another one to the list with EA Games president Frank Gibeau, who spoke with Develop recently.

“What I learned from Mirror’s Edge is that you have to execute, you have to spend more time on a game to ensure it’s polished, and you need to have the depth and persistence of an online game. There were issues with the learning curve, the difficulty, the narrative, and then there was no multiplayer either. The key learning from us was that if you’re going to be bold with that kind of concept, you need to take it as far as it can go in development.”

“Dead Space was different,” he says. “It made money for us, but didn’t hit expectations. We felt like we had an IP that struck a chord, and one that hit quality, but again it missed multiplayer modes. So when we re-worked Dead Space, we looked at how to make it a better idea, how do we make the story more engrossing, how do we build Isaac as a character, how do we make this game a success online.

“But one thing I will say is that we won’t give up on those IPs. A new idea obviously has a lot of risk attached to it, but if you get it all right it can be huge.” I like his sentiment there at the end, but I’m not convinced adding multiplayer to everything is the end-all solution — or even necessary — in a lot of cases.

A Frank discussion with EA [Develop]