Most of the stuff seems to be just trying to forcefully appear to the mainstream trends like the pointless leveling up and a hollow open world. Hell, even the small changes they made to the movement made it feel not as good as the original. You reach top speed almost immediately, all of the effects feel diminished and muted which also make Faith feel more lighter, which in my opinion is not as good as the weightier original with a lot of head bob and other effects. Same thing with the sounds, they were a lot meatier before.
Obviously, I hate the XP, I've said that several times. But the open world works really well here because of how much fun movement is. The original ME was a game about moving from point A to point B across a series of strewn-together rooftops. Put that into an open world, and you've taken the main complaint about open world games—that it's just a bunch of walking between locations—and turned it into a main gameplay asset.
The other changes I'm pretty sure were done in the name of accessibility, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I know a lot of people who simply couldn't get into Mirror's Edge 2008. Hopefully they'll be able to play this time.
And despite these changes, I just don't think the controls are that different. On Saturday evening, after playing the Beta for about two hours, I decided to load up the original game and run through some chapters. What struck me wasn't how different the old game was, but how similar it felt. They've tweaked minor things, but nothing more.
Lastly the combat was never the high point, nor the main focus of the game so i don't get why they decided to knuckle down on it, combat was usually over in a counter or a hit or two in the first one and now even in the beta they throw way more enemies at you with way more health than they used to, i can only imagine what happens if you don't invest points in dealing more damage late in the game.
I don't understand this
at all. Do you remember the freaking ship level in Mirror's Edge 2008? There were guys with guns
everywhere. Yeah, I suppose they technically had less health in that they could be brought down with one hit, but timing that hit properly could take a lot of tries, and if you didn't have any Focus saved up, or you mistimed its deployment, you were essentially screwed. Yes, I know it was
possible to avoid all combat in that game, but doing so was really,
really difficult.
In comparison, combat in this game is both infrequent and over quickly. And
with obvious exceptions, it can be avoided fairly easily.
