| artur-fernand said:
And I felt the same about Mirror's Edge. I really like the concept of the game, but the amount trial-and-error there was kinda maddening. I'm looking forward to the sequel though, hopefully this will be improved |
It's the "quarter muncher" design. There's nothing wrong with it; it's how arcade machines made money afterall, and a lot of 8 bit games (and their 16 bit sequels) followed the same design, not because of the payoff benefits, but because it also catered to hardware based upon limited memory and processing capabilities. And of course, many game designers of the time were simply doing ports of arcade games.
Once games shifted off the arcade/quarter design, it opened up the way games were designed. Part of that was less reliance upon cheap deaths, automatic attrition (in games designed to slowly chip away at resources/life until more money was inserted to keep going), and restarts.
These days, it's almost unacceptable if a game makes the player repeat too long of a segment due to save points being too sparse or too far apart. Unless that mechanic is built into the gameplay itself (typically as an old school game extender), there's really no excuse for that type of design with the availability of automatic save files and saves on demand.
Mirror's Edge was designed as a game for speed runs. And because it was designed as such, if the designers allowed the player to explore/complete a level any other way than the designer intended, there would be the risk of having a game that could be run through in far too little time without having to memorize levels first. Old school design based on old school mechanics, but making clever use of polygon graphics for a first person game. I really liked the concept as it stood apart from FPS games, I just found that I had lost my patience for that type of design in the 90s.
