Fans have been clamouring for a sequel to Mirror's Edge

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What a tease.

Thankfully, the team at DICE are just as passionate about Mirror's Edge as the hardcore fans. “We've been working on ideas back and forth for the last 4-5 years,” EA Games Label EVP - and former DICE CEO - Patrick Soderlund tells me at Gamescom. “Some ideas we've gone longer on, some ideas we immediately said no to."So what changed? “Sara Jansson, who is the executive producer on it now, came up with this idea, and she pitched the concept to me and Karl-Magnus, who is the GM at DICE, that we frankly couldn't resist,” he says. “We then tested it on Frank Gibeau, my boss, and other people inside the company, and everyone said 'yes, please bring this back'. That's all we need. At that time, you kind of forget about the P&L [profit and loss] paper exercise, and you look at it as - okay, we've got to make this game: for the sake of DICE, for the sake of the franchise, for the sake of EA, and for the sake of consumers.”But how successful was the original title? “It actually did okay, over a period of time, but it wasn't the smash hit that we anticipated it to become,” he says. That's not the be all and end all, however. “I'm a firm believer that if a team makes a game that they're passionate about, that gamers long for, that we back, it has a much bigger chance of succeeding than if you were to make a game that looks great on paper, and is the right P&L exercise. That's not how I believe in making business. Mirror's Edge is actually a game that, it was just about time and the right idea, rather than anything else.”Having something like Battlefield, that does so well for us, with a very strong team behind it,” he continues, “one can look at it as an overall portfolio, and say 'we need something [else] in that mix'. If you're BMW, you may have a high end sports car that maybe on paper makes no sense, but you need it anyway because the brand needs it, and it's good for the fans. That's how we need to look at it. You know, we will have our 3 series and our 5 series, but we also want to have our 1 series – maybe that's an indie one – and we also want to have the extreme ones, so just like any other company, it's a matter of balancing a portfolio.”

Unfortunately, Soderlund wouldn't give any real details on the pitch that so impressed the bigwigs at DICE and EA. All he would confirm is that the idea was true to the original game's vision, with the same first person perspective and broadly speaking the same style of art direction, and that it “embraced the things that made Mirror's Edge great, and maybe removed some of the things that weren't so good.”

Combat? I ask. “Combat – as you saw in the trailer – is a big part of the game,” Soderlund replies, “but in a cool way. Maybe downplaying shooting more, looking at movement, looking at the things that were good with the game, but then there were other things that she brought in that I can't go into now... She pitched a game that I don't think can be built on a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox 360. The design of it and the online and technical capabilities of the game design makes it only possible on a gen 4 machine. That's exciting to me.”Again, Soderlund wouldn't be drawn on what those online and technical capabilities are, or whether the game will embrace a more open-world design. All we really know right now is that this is both a reboot and an origin story for Faith, and that it's the passion of Sara Jansson and DICE that is making the next-gen Mirror's Edge a reality.

Cam Shea is the Senior Editor at IGN Australia. Click these links and hit follow so we can be friends! Twitter