Update: We just played the beta and can verify that this is the case. According to one of our writers, it’s the “only game I’ve played in recent memory that it’s actually noticeably bad. The textures are really bad when you get up close.” Another writer encountered significant texture pop-in at times. Hopefully DICE will be able to fix these issues as Star Wars: Battlefront suffered from terrible frame rates during the beta. Unfortunately, these issues seem to go beyond just frame rate so we’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out in a few months. According to Digital Foundry, the frame rate on Xbox One seems to hover in the mid-forties and there are also severe frame pacing problems.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a highly anticipated title. The original Mirror’s Edge game was a game that followed a very simple art-style and was extremely clean all-around. For a game releasing in 2008, the original game still looks pretty decent compared to games that released late in the 360’s lifespan.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, however, looks very underwhelming on the Xbox One, especially when compared to what we’ve been expecting out of EA and DICE lately. While the majority of games released under Frostbite 3 on the Xbox One do run at the same 720p that Mirror’s Edge reportedly runs at, DICE’s Star Wars: Battlefront was an incredible looking title compared the extremely soft-looking world of Mirror’s Edge.
Images posted onto the Xbox One subreddit by Redditor Sebianoti showcase still images of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’s world do give us a glimpse into what we can actually expect from the upcoming reboot. The game still does retain the very simplistic and vibrant art-style from the original but the image quality does show a lot of blur overall. There seems to be a constant shimmer, due to the lowered resolution, on edges at a medium to far distance whereas closer up objects are—while still subject to their fair amount of jaggies—are covered up a little bit better.
What is pretty disappointing, however, is the texture quality. While the walls of simple colours from the original hold up fine, objects such as pipes and floors look quite dated. NPC models on the Xbox One version also seem to look pretty dated too, especially when compared to other titles running on Frostbite 3 such as Battlefront. In fact, some of the NPC models look like they belong in the original game.
But is this surprising? Frostbite 3 titles do seem to generally run at 720p on the Xbox One; this is pretty much a given from DICE. This may be due to the reports that Mirror’s Edge does run at an unlocked 60 FPS—compared to the original game’s 30 FPS—as well as the engine handling a pretty large world compared to that of previous Frostbite titles. It’s clear that the engine just isn’t optimized enough from what DICE have been putting out recently. While we do appreciate Mirror’s Edge Catalyst retaining the style of the original game, we didn’t expect it to look like it came out in the same year as it. Here’s hoping that the graphics get a little boost when the title is out of beta. However, knowing DICE, don’t get your hopes up.
Source: Reddit
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.