One year later...
Okay, I think I found more about that puzzling mirror. And if I'm right, then Deledrius' suspicions were correct.
First, the thing that I noticed in the trailer last time:
- Show Spoiler
The avatar is on the wrong side of the mirror. The room reflected by the mirror is the BCO we know, the room the avatar is standing in is actually a reflection.
Which means there were actually two separate room meshes that were supposed to look like a mirror. The avatar's reflection was a copy of the avatar mesh itself by the engine (and probably very buggy, since duplicating runtime objects isn't trivial).
When Cyan turned it into the BCO we know now, they deleted half of the room. We got the half in the mirror, not the half the avatar was standing in the trailer.
Now, it could simply be that Cyan couldn't implement DynamicCamMaps due to technical limitations at the time. Or, having two rooms was somehow better, for one of those two reasons:
- the reflection would show a room with suble differences for a puzzle
- or the player needed to cross through the mirror at some point.
But I might still be wrong here.
Last time, I was also wondering - if it's an illusion, could it have ties with the Guild of Illusionists ? But Illusionists operated in Katha, not on Ae'gura, so that was strange.
Except I'm beginning to wonder if the BCO was always intended to be on Ae'gura. Who knows, maybe originally it was supposed to be on Katha.
And lo and behold,
a nice map of Katha that we never saw in HD until today's release. Bottom-left-hand corner:
- Show Spoiler
Between a "secret office" and the music room, there exists a "oneway mirror".
Now, this doesn't mean it's the same mirror, nor the same office, and my original theory of the player stepping through the mirror doesn't hold up. And a DynamicCamMap would have been a better choice in this case.
But still, it's a bit too much to be a coincidence. I suspect the mirror idea was bounced around when they were designing Katha, and they used the BCO room as a test ground.
Go figure...