Prince of Persia: Warrior Within’s Yannis Mallat talks about upcoming title during an open chat in an online room

By Michael Lafferty

“It’s the same world we are talking about, but we are showing you a different angle/perspective.”

The title took the gaming world by storm. It garnered its share of awards in 2003 and was commercially successful as well as critically acclaimed. So, how do you follow up on a blockbuster title?

Ubisoft has the answer in the form of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the true sequel to The Sands of Time. The game’s executive producer was on hand during a live chat on the Sony PlayStation site to field questions about the title.

The game itself does have an ominous overtone. Why?

The Old Man said to the Prince, "Your fate has been written. You will die."

The story takes place seven years after the original Sands of Time title. The prince is the living consequence of his actions from the first title. He is being chased by the Guardian of Time (Nona the Dehaka).

According to Yannis Mallat, the executive producer on Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the game is “a pure sequel story-wise. In terms of how you approach the story, there is a usual shift, it’s really about the prince – the prince is the center of everything in this game. It’s not save a damsel, it’s risking your life to change your fate.”

Yannis fielded questions during a live chat on the Sony PlayStation chat rooms. Players and media alike were welcomed to the discussion and submitted questions.

The question was asked about the “Sand Powers” in the game and how they will work.

“There are more powers in this game than in Sands of Time – we have kept the slow motion, the fast forward, we have, of course, kept the rewind and we have added the shockwave,” Yannis said. “All of those powers are embedded within the action/gameplay, meaning that enemies in fighting situations call on those sand powers to be used. The same goes for the exploration part of the game where sand powers are called by the gameplay. The cool thing with the sand powers in Warrior Within is that the prince doesn’t need the dagger anymore. He has kept the medallion from the first game and the medallion is embedded into his armor. The medallion does the job of collecting the sand by itself.

“One of the complaints in Sands of Time was that in order to kill enemies you had to retrieve sand with the dagger and that became routine and boring. In Warrior Within, it does the job for you and leaves the fun stuff for the player to do.”

Another participant in the discussion asked if the Empress of Time will be one of the bosses that can be fought.

“Yes, of course the Empress of Time is one of the numerous bosses that you will have to fight in the game,” Yannis replied. “She is mortal but she certainly is not human. She was made eons ago by the gods and she is some sort of by-product of the creation/timeline itself. Remember that the prince has corrupted the timeline in the previous game by opening the sands of the hourglass, not only is he chased by the Dehaka, but he will have to face the Empress of Time because she carries part of the timeline within her. A confrontation is a sure thing. The old man knows a bit about her and he tells the prince.”

‘Drain Red’ asked if the same surreal feel will be in the new title or if there will be more rage and anger in the game’s tone.

“A lot of people say that we have lost something with Warrior Within in terms of the general feel regarding the Persian environment,” Yannis stated. “I definitely don’t agree. Some people also say that we have lost our inspiration from Arabian Nights – that’s not true either. I think if you read the book you can find in it a more gruesome, a more cruel, a more rough description of the world. PoP2 is bringing that view of the game. We are not losing anything; on the contrary, we are gaining something. It’s the same world we are talking about, but we are showing you a different angle/perspective. I can guarantee that we haven’t lost anything. The surreal feel is still there – it’s not the same though – it’s a little more crude, but it’s still there.”

Graphically the first game was an amazing treat for the eyes. Will PoP2 be using the same engine and will the graphics be upgraded in any way?

“Both,” Yannis said. “We are indeed working with the same engine, team and tools. This is the only way I know to produce high quality content in the classic way. It’s also the best way I know to better the previous iteration, meaning we have been able to optimize the tools. We have a very trained team that knows how to work with each other. In terms of creating the graphics, yes, we have upgraded the graphics in several ways. First, we upgraded the graphics by optimizing the engines. We are able to display more polygons, more special effects, more maps, less slowdown, more textures, more of everything. The experience for the players, for the eyes, is that you feel like the world is much bigger, much richer. This is some kind of paradox, where we are really surprising the player by providing a rich world in detail that HUGE. Usually it’s one or the other – but we have both.”

Alimokrane asked if the PC version will have the same optional modes as the Xbox and will it support downloadable content?

“No,” said Yannis. “Unfortunately the reason behind this is that it’s one thing to plug some online components on the Xbox but it’s another thing to do that on the PC. Xbox is basically a plug-and-play; this is not the case at all on PCs where you have to support all systems, configurations, Internet connection. PCs are naturally our target.”

It was asked what improvements will be made to the fighting system.

“The dev team has listened to players and consumers after Sands of Time launched and we have found ways to improve the game even though the game was well received,” stated Yannis. “In our opinion, the fighting system lacked depth. Enemies were responding here and there, out of nowhere leading to frustrating situations. The biggest of all changes was made on the fighting system.

“We made sure it was embedded into the core action of the game, into the core campaign. We addressed that in two ways: we have added a lot of moves/fighting behavior. All of the moves we have in Warrior Within make him able to fight while using the environment, which was not true in Sands of Time. And that makes the difference because in Sands of Time you had this sequential experience where you fight and figure out puzzles. Now you can do both at the same time. The other way is through the enemies. In Sands of Time, the enemies are sharing the same AI. In PoP: Warrior Within, we have specific AI per enemy which allows us to use specific enemy behavior per enemy. Now running on the wall can be more dangerous because you may have to fight while running on the wall.

“All of the level ingredients – the wall, columns, the rope, the curtains – are here to enhance/support the fighting experience. If you are surrounded by 4-6 enemies, you can use that column to fight. It combines level design and fighting.”

Yannis was asked how the stunning physics and gameplay movements were accomplished.

“The last thing that you want to do to achieve such a high degree of animation is use motion capture,” he said. “What we’ve done instead is build upon Sands of Time. We made all of the animation by hand. Motion capture could give you maybe the best/most beautiful animation cycle. But say you want an animation of a double back flip/back-kick and then you ask Jackie Chan to do that move, you need the best animation cycle. When it comes to link that cycle in a game engine with 80 animations it will look bad. The secret is building all of the animations by hand and all of the transition animations that link all of the animation cycles with the others. That cannot be achieved through motion capture.

“In terms of physics, we have developed our internal physics engine and we have decided that physics would take a big part of the game so we have lived within the constraints. We have devoted some CPU power and memory to that so yes, we are able to develop physics animated curtains that move according to the wind. It’s only a question of choice. When you decide to do pure things better, then you will get good results.”

One participant wanted to know what prompted the development team to make the game M rated rather than T rated like the original.

“The whole idea behind switching from T to M came from the dev team,” said Yannis, “it was not a market thing. Why go M? Because we knew that we had to make this character, the prince, evolve. We knew that he was cool in The Sands of Time, but we wanted to make him outstanding. Our desire to make him appear was to make him grown up, older, aware of his destiny. In order to do that, we had to leverage all of the cruelty around him, all of the nasty things that happen in his world. To be able to exploit that in the best way we wanted to limits so we decided to go M. This would give us no limits to realize this character as strong and grown up. I don’t think this will impact sales at all. If anything we will gain more sales.”

One person in the chat wanted to know if the difficulty will be increased in Warrior Within, and stated that The Sands of Time was relatively easy for him/her.

“There are several difficulty levels but the global and overall difficulty of the game is harder in a sense that it is a much longer game, much more challenging in terms of fighting,” Yannis said. “But the prince has much more at his disposal now. For example, if you master the prince’s abilities, then the difficulty will be adjusted by the system.”

The final questions of the chat revolved about the existence of the Sands of Time within the framework of Warrior Within, and how long the game of Warrior Within will be. Yannis addressed the first topic …

“Story wise the Sands of Time have to exist because they have not been destroyed,” he said. “In fact, the prince is trying to travel backwards through time through the creation of the sands themselves. If there are no sands, then there will be no guardian of time to chase him. Regarding gameplay, I think I would think twice before getting rid of the Sands of Time because it’s cool to play, rewinding time – it’s just cool. The whole quest is to get rid of the sands. Who knows if he will manage to achieve the quest; it will be up to the players to do that. The sad news is that we know that the prince is going to die …”

… And about the length of the game …

“We know for sure that Warrior Within will be three times the length of Sands of Time,” Yannis stated. “I know this sounds surprising but once again since we have been working with the same engine, tools, team, we have been able to create real high quality content in a very short amount of time. Because we have listened to the players one of the complaints was that the game was too short. We have really expanded the length of the whole game. For an anecdote: last year our best tester was able to finish The Sands of Time in 3 hours. But with Warrior Within, it took him 8 ½ hours. You should expect 20 hours of gameplay for Warrior Within.”

The Prince of Persia: Warrior Within will ship on the GameCube, PC, PlayStation2 and Xbox platforms and will be available beginning November 30.

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