Bringing next-gen Mirror's Edge to current consoles would mean too many compromises

The origin story sequel to Mirror's Edge is a game that includes core concepts that can't be created on existing consoles, executive vice president of EA's games label Patrick Soderlund tells Polygon.

While the game's origin story is an important element of the game, what really sold EA on this particular treatment was the executive producer's vision.

"We have worked on the next Mirror's Edge with a small group of people for a long time, and different groups of people for a long time," he said, explaining why the sequel has been so long in coming. "We've decided we need to make the right game and we need to make the right decision about what the right game was.

"We got to a couple of concepts that looked promising but in the end we stopped making."

Soderlund said the company didn't start work on the game until the senior producer, Sara Jansson, presented her vision for the game.

"It was something that I just looked at and said, we have it, let's do this," he said. "It wasn't so much the story , even though that's very important, but it was about the game and how the game was going to be played and what you can do and what Faith does. It amplified the things that were good with Mirror's Edge and downplayed the things that were bad in a very natural cool way and combined it with a bunch of really inspiring cool things."

Revealed at this year's E3, Jansson said at the time that the game would be a first-person action adventure starring Faith that would stay true to the original title.

The title is coming to Xbox One, PS4 and PC, and not to current-generation consoles. That's because, Soderlund tells Polygon, the company would have to change the game's core concept too much to make it work.

"It just happened to be a game design that I don't think you can build on an old-gen machine," he said. "It doesn't work the way it's designed. And that also appeals to me. We could maybe get it to work on one, but we would have to compromise on too many things. With this we didn't have to.

"It's a true next-gen idea, with next-gen execution and that felt right."