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Ubisoft has made public their plans for the next installment in the Prince of Persia franchise. Will they continue the gripping story of Elika and the vagabond Prince from last year’s criminally poor performing Prince of Persia? Of course not, you fools! They appear to be returning to the “Sands of Time” universe with their freshly teased title, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.
If you played through last year’s PoP and the accompanying DLC epilogue, you’ll know the story was left on quite the cliffhanger. If you were even mildly invested in the new look of the series, I’m betting you’ll be disappointed with the soon-to-be revealed title. Ubisoft plans to release the game in parallel with the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster (yes, I use the term loosely).
Did you play the new (old) Prince of Persia? Am I crazy for being bummed about this news? Let us know your thoughts below.
In a bit of news that should take take absolutely NO ONE by surprise, Ubisoft has announced that they will be releasing DLC for Prince of Persia. The DLC is being called the Epilogue DLC and appears to be an attempt to actually finish the game’s story, though personally I hold no hope. Minor spoiler here, the original ending to the game was mind blowingly awful and completely invalidates all of the player’s work. Ubisoft doesn’t care and sees quite the opportunity to sell you what may or may not be an actual ending.
From IGN’s interview,
The team decided to go on ahead full throttle with some cool ideas that the team had during and post-production and developed a unique DLC that would enhance the experience for Prince of Persia fans…..This is one of the most ambitious DLC projects from Ubisoft, and it adds to the understanding of PoP’s new world and characters.
That is just sad. The fact that they admit that making a proper ending to their game is one of their most ambitious DLC projects is ridiculous. In the interview they also promise that the DLC will further the “development” (Quotations added… because development is a strong word…) of the relationship between the Prince and Elika. The DLC also brings a new power for Elika, a new enemy called the shapeshifter that apparently is a shadowy figure that takes the shape of the characters that are already in the game, and a sprint “feature” that serves as an attack. It will also have achievements/trophies, as well as two unlockable skins. My favorite part of IGN’s interview? When asked if this DLC would complete the story or if there would still be room for more bonus (read:paid for) content, the answer was “Nothing has been announced yet”.
Via IGN
Story (or campaign) modes are the motivation that drives us to play through a game.
Like a good book, when you start you want to see what events will transpire, what will happen to various characters, and learn about the world in which our journey takes place. So when the ending to a game we play is a disappointment, I feel a little cheated at times. It feels like all the time I have invested in a game is a waste. Sure, the gameplay was fun and the character development was interesting, but to have an entire story canon voided with a melodramatic and rushed ending bugs me.
Before I embark on five of the most disappointing endings, I should set up some ground rules:
Let’s begin! Oh, and of course, there will be spoilers.
Prince of Persia was a unique gaming experience for me. It has some amazing aspects to it, the graphics, the animation, and the environments were all great. However, it’s not without its flaws, some glaring and some that would only affect certain people. One thing that I absolutely despise in games is back tracking for the sake of making the game longer (I’m looking at you Devil May Cry 4). Prince of Persia demands that you do at least a little backtracking but for some reason, I didn’t mind. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed it so much that I got all 1,001 light seeds. Why is that? I hate collecting things in games. Crackdown’s orbs angered me to no end and the death cards in Call of Duty: World at War mean less than nothing to me, so why would I spend hours collecting small spheres of light?
This isn’t huge news or anything, but Shamus Young posted a really intriguing mini-documentary on his blog, Twenty Sided. It goes into detail about the accessibility of games to the non-gamer, and how Prince of Persia offers an innovative game experience by not delivering punitive punishment for every mistake. Unlike games such as Mirror’s Edge, when you die in PoP the game doesn’t drag you back 10 or 15 minutes to the last check point effectively erasing your progress. While it’s not something that bothers the average gamer, Young points out that people who are interested in gaming get more easily frustrated at these setbacks than “seasoned” gamers. It’s completely understandable. People who are new at gaming make a lot of mistakes. If they are going to lose a significant amount of progress each time they fail, what fun is there?
The video is posted below, but I encourage you to visit his site as it gives a bit more detail about the making of this mini-documentary.
When gamers hear the phrase “Prince of Persia”, they will most likely think a platforming game where a prince runs on walls and does acrobatic stunts. To non-gamers they’ll think literally a prince from Persia. At least that’s the meaning I’m getting from this article from the New York Times today.
Seth Schiesel is afraid that the newest rendition of Prince of Persia by Ubisoft isn’t being culturally responsible:
In fairness, the new Prince of Persia does not claim any historical or cultural authenticity; the game is set in a fantastic magical realm rather than in a rendition of any real place. But does that absolve the game of any responsibility? I think not.
With the Prince this time around who “talks and behaves like a 17-year-old American mall rat” and has a “fully Anglicized facial features and what looks like a tan he picked up on spring break” Schiesel fears that the game isn’t faithful to the Persian culture.
That’s all understandable but his closing paragraph raised some concerns in my mind:
Prince of Persia is a great game, but simply being a video game is no longer sufficient to earn a pass from being held to account for shaping the perceptions and attitudes of its players. Not anymore.
Schiesel brings up the point of Orientalism where the West has a certain depiction of the Eastern cultures. I’m quite surprised Schiesel said nothing about movies and television doing the same thing but within the same culture. What about old western movies or television dramas like “The OC”? Certainly there are people with a specific vision of Orange County because of the television show.
Besides, the concept of East and West can be really confusing sometimes.
Ubisoft releasing a game with no DRM? No crippling install limit or broken rootkit? Has the world gone mad? Possibly, but probably not.
As Ben Kuchera points out in his article on Ars Technica, this could all be a rather cunning ruse by Ubisoft to prove DRM works. Pirates often claim that the reason they wear an eye patch and shout “Arrr” is due to the often crappy DRM that comes free with most PC games. By providing a game without DRM, Ubisoft are running an experiment to prove them wrong.
Writing on the official Ubisoft forum, pessimistic Community Manager UbiRazz said: “A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine.”
So, either Ubisoft will sell more copies, or they have a great excuse to put DLC on everything else, ever. I think Kuchera sums it up best.
So what will happen with Prince of Persia? The game will be pirated. The game would have been pirated no matter what DRM was placed in the game, naturally, but by removing DRM and waiting for the title to hit the torrents, Ubisoft has given itself an out whenever they’re taken to task over DRM in the future.
Via: Game Politics
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