PC ports often get quite a bit of speculation -- "will it be a crappy port? Will it have DRM? Why is it delayed? Can my configuration run this thing?" Well, regarding Mirror's Edge, DICE hears you. Recently designer Fredrik "Feffe" Thylander joined the Mirror's Edge online community and has answered these things (well, all but the DRM question).

Firstly, he says, the game was not delayed for reasons of piracy (i.e. delaying it to encourage people buy a console version instead), and not because "PC is dead", either. As a matter of fact, it wasn't delayed at all, they've just been working on it to make it as good as it can be:

"It takes a lot of time and effort to fix streaming, graphics, physics and all other things that are pretty much locked down on a console to work on a wide variety of PC hardware. Add to that making sure the menus feel nice and work properly on a PC rather then just coming off as a port.

Furthermore, we've been working hard with nvidia on physX support and other nice bonuses. Since we have a lot of people doing different things simultaniously we can take the opportunity to let a few guys who are not working on bugs and "must-fix" issues do some enhancements such as physX while we try to reach a final candidate."

Next up is the downloadable content (DLC), which is also not contrived:

"I hear things which we hear *every* time we make DLC: "They kept that out of the original game just to be able to sell it afterwards" or "It's just their initial proof-of-concept levels with some added graphics". Some people even think they look cheap because they are abstract and stylized.

I think those guys should look again."

Thylander explains they have a team which worked on the content immediately after they were finished with designing and building; a lot of ideas were thrown around but in the end they decided on more time trials because a lot of people had said the mode "represents Mirror's Edge movement and flow at it's purest".

As for the aesthetics, that's something else:

"The visual style is selected to make sure it looks cool, unique and each level has a specific mood to it. Also, it tells you we are building it from scratch. Except for that one rat there in the trailer, 100% of what you see in the DLC is brand spanking new, created just for this, which includes new work from our brilliant sound-guys. We liked the idéa of going for pure gameplay, without the distractions that come when you must dress a level to look real-world. It makes the levels readable and understandable in a whole new way. It also allows us to build some structures that exist just because they are fun as hell to move on, rather then having to look like something that could exist in the real world."

And finally, the system requirements have been updated. He explains they are what they are partly because despite the PhysX acceleration the game can utilize, they didn't want it to be a "must have" as not everyone has PhysX-supported cards yet. As such, the core experience will remain the same. A wise choice, considering the relatively low requirements:

• Operating System Microsoft Windows XP SP2 / Vista
• Processor Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz or 100% compatible equivalent
• Memory 1GB RAM
• Video Card 256MB memory with Shader Model 3.0
• HDD Space 8GB
• DVD Drive 1x DVD Drive
• Soundcard Soundcard with DirectX 9.0c compatibility
• DirectX DirectX 9.0c
• Network - An online connection is required for access to Leaderboards