November 21, 2008

Arabian Knights: GameZone chats with Prince of Persia Producer Ben Mattes
By: Steven Hopper

“Just because someone invented the camera, doesn’t mean that people stopped painting.”

Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia series has been around for quite some time now, but within the past several years with the Sands of Time trilogy, the franchise has really come onto its own as a stalwart force in the action-adventure genre. However, instead of building upon the story and gameplay arc the publisher had presented in the trilogy, Ubisoft has decided to start fresh with the first high-def entry to the series, the aptly named Prince of Persia.

Prince of Persia does away with the time control features that were the series’ bread and butter, and instead introduces a brand new combat model, improved platforming, and an awesome open-world environment to explore. At a recent press event for the game, GameZone had the chance to sit down with Ben Mattes, the game’s Producer at Ubisoft Montreal, for a candid discussion about the game’s journey through development, it’s influences within the industry, and what the team’s biggest challenges have been.

The Prince of Persia franchise had a successful trilogy with the Sands of Time games, so why decide to reboot it?

Ben Mattes: Because it was time. If we had continued to use the same gameplay mechanics or the same core story, the uniqueness would’ve died out. There are car racing video games out there with the rewind mechanic in them now. There are certain mechanics that were perhaps initially very unique and distinct about Prince of Persia that have lost some of their “tangy lemon flavor” because a lot of other people have adopted those mechanics. We had other stories to tell and other mechanics that we wanted to explore and other avenues and directions to push the game. So, I think it was exactly the right time to introduce some new characters, some new mechanics and some new life into the franchise and the universe of Prince of Persia.

The game features a very distinct look when compared to other games in the franchise. What was behind the stylized approach to the art direction?

Ben: Basically, we wanted to be unique. That line is a composite answer for a lot of the questions that I get asked, but the fact of the matter is, we really want to stand out from our competition. The action-adventure genre is a hyper-competitive one. There’s a lot of competition and a lot of incredible games in that space, and sometimes the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty intense, so we wanted to make sure that we really stood out and regained our crown as the king of the action-adventure genre.

One of the ways that we wanted to do that was to create a very unique, very distinct artistic direction that didn’t look like another game. We want other games to copy us, and we want to be the game that sets the trend, so that next year you have people doing version 2.0 and iterating on this next-gen cel-shading concept that we’ve come up with.

We feel that we have a very unique artistic direction for a very unique game and the fact that the illustrative direction is very “fantasy”, really dovetails in a very nice way with the subject matter of the game. When you look at games like Street Fighter IV and Valkyrie Chronicles, and these other games that are also exploring the space that sits between the hyper-stylized Okami-esque, and the hyper-realistic Call of Duty-esque game and see all of these other high-profile games exploring that middle ground, it’s justification for us on the development team that we’re onto something. There’s lots of room for exploration in the artistic direction of video games, and we don’t all have to try and make our video games look like photographs. Just because someone invented the camera, doesn’t mean that people stopped painting.

What has changed in the acrobatic platforming element of the game?

Ben: At the simplest level, we just added more stuff that the Prince can interact with to give him a larger repertoire of ingredients that he can do his acrobatics off of. But, there are more fundamental changes that we made to the acrobatics that I think allow it to rise to a whole new level. The first is the “jump anywhere” system.

How you wallrun is different; you don’t press a button to wallrun. You simply jump at the wall, and then you’ll automatically run it, then you jump to eject from that wall. This allows the player to have a lot more freedom and control over their acrobatics, since they can chain together a lot of acrobatic moves through the use of this “jump anywhere” system. They can eject from a wallrun at any point in time and they can jump into an ingredient at any point in time from a wallrun, from the ground, or from where ever.

Because of that jump anywhere system, we also had to implement a lot of helper systems to make sure that it wasn’t a trial-and-error game of repetition. That’s no fun, you don’t get any rhythm with that, so we also developed a really advanced jump helper system that does tons of complex calculations and blending of animations in order to make sure that we will be able to dynamically blend the animations to make it look nice and blend the distance so that the Prince perfectly lands on the ingredient. This allows super-hardcore players and beginners to pull off really spectacular acrobatic sequences and get that flow which is so critical to the Prince of Persia experience.

I think that Prince of Persia has better acrobatic flow than any platforming game that’s ever come out before. Of course I’m biased, but I could literally run from one end of the world to another end of the world without breaking stride, in one long chain of uninterrupted unbroken acrobatic sequences, and that’s cool.

Sands of Time gave you an AI person to go around with you, while the new game takes this element comes to a whole new level, making the AI counterpart an integral part of gameplay. Why bring this element to the forefront?

Ben: Farah was a very important parameter in the success of Prince of Persia. When we look at our consumer studies from previous generations of games, one of the things that a lot of people really liked was Farah. She added to the story, had character development, there was romance, she was good looking, and she was cool.

There were a lot of good things about Farah, except that she was basically a narrative device. She was a story-telling mechanic. She might as well have been a narrator; she had almost zero gameplay value that wasn’t 100-percent scripted, in both Sands of Time and The Two Thrones. So, what we wanted to do was take this idea of a support character that has a potential love interest element and has the whole story element and character development (the Yin to the Prince’s Yang), but we also wanted push her to the next level in terms of integration to gameplay.

Resident Evil 4, one of the best games of all time, has this Ashley character, and honestly she was a drag. She was a pain because you had to babysit her. Obviously, I don’t mean to detract anything from Resident Evil 4, it was a spectacular game, but the Ashley sequences were not necessarily the strongest sequences of the game, in my opinion. So, what we wanted to do was take the idea of having this support character who’s following you in the game world and there for narrative reasons, but make her cool and make her as powerful a tool in the arsenal of the player as their favorite gun.

We also asked ourselves, when players talk about videogames, when do they use the word love? They never use the word love to describe a character. They use the word love to describe a weapon, or a power, or something that makes them feel cool. That’s what we wanted; we don’t want them to necessarily fall in love with Elika, but we want them to use positive terminology when describing her because that means that they don’t resent her. They don’t hate the fact that she’s around, and as such there’s the potential to build more interest in storytelling elements and mechanisms off of that. We treated her, first and foremost in the development of her, like a weapon. Infinite ammo, never gets rusty, is permanently connected to you so you can’t lose it, and is super-powerful and makes you look like a badass. Oh, and she’s hot and she’s got personality.

The game’s combat model changes it up from the Sands of Time Trilogy, focusing more on one-on-one fighting as opposed to one-on-many. Why do that?

Ben: There’s a lot there. Again, we wanted to be unique. Let’s face it; God of War won. They won the hack n’ slash, visceral, brutal-combat, action-adventure war. Let them have it. Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Devil May Cry; there’s a laundry list of competitors in that space, and we didn’t want to go head-to-head with those guys, we wanted to do something that was our own, that was unique and different, that was fresh.

I’m a huge fan of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. He’s an Indiana Jones, right? Great character. The problem is, how many people has Indiana Jones killed in the movies? Maybe three or four? He doesn’t kill a lot. He hurts a lot of people, but he doesn’t necessarily kill a lot of people. Now, how many people did Drake kill? Like three-thousand. How does that guy sleep at night? Here’s this approachable, fallible kind of accessible action hero, but who’s like Kratos when it comes to massacring tons of guys. We didn’t want that; we didn’t want to create the realistic human action hero who then butchers an entire legion of grunts. We wanted it to be different; we wanted the player to really feel a sense of accomplishment for every enemy they defeated, like a great duel.

When Jordan Mechner created the original Prince of Persia, he was highly influenced by swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies and great duel scenes like in Princess Bride. There’s something unique and very special about overcoming an enemy who is a challenge and not just a pushover. We wanted that feeling where every enemy encounter is monumentally significant, like in Shadow of the Colossus, where every time you encountered an enemy, they were unique and special.

We also wanted a fight system that allowed for a lot of collaboration between the Prince and Elika to do really spectacular combat sequences. If we’d had multiple enemies, it wouldn’t have worked out as well. We wanted a spectacular tag-team, acrobatic combat, and we didn’t want micro-management RTS combat. In having only one enemy at a time, you don’t have to choose which enemy you are attacking; you’re always only attacking only guy, which allowed us to move the camera in close and make sure that you have that visceral Hollywood movie style combat experience. There are a lot of reasons why we went in the direction that we did.

Prince of Persia is also notable for not having character death within the game. Why get rid of this mechanic?

Ben: Again, that’s like a five hour long answer [laughs]. First of all, we knew from the very beginning that we didn’t want a Game Over screen. If I never see another Game Over screen for the rest of my life, I’ll die a happy man. What possible value does a Game Over screen serve on a console game? Why do we need Game Over screens? They exist because when arcades were the thing, you wanted to leech as many quarters out of the pockets of young boys as you possibly could.

Game Over screens are an archaic leftover of the history of videogames that I think we’ve outgrown. I don’t think we need them anymore. We knew right away that we didn’t want to have Game Over screens. The other thing is we knew we needed a second chance mechanism, like the rewind power from the Sands of Time trilogy. We wanted Elika saving the Prince from splatting on the ground and bringing him back to safe ground.

Then the question we asked was, do we want limit it in an economy system or make it infinite? We opted for infinite because it served all of our purposes. It keeps the game accessible so beginners aren’t going to throw their controllers down in frustration because they’re constantly splatting on the ground and starting back at the beginning of the game. Honestly though, if we’d have implemented an economy system, the hardcore players would’ve never needed it because they don’t die. They wouldn’t have had to take advantage of it, since they’d have always had a maxed out “save me” meter and they wouldn’t have needed it.

The other thing is, what is a “save me”? It’s a rolling checkpoint, just like in God of War, Fable II, Gears of War, Mirror’s Edge. The idea of a rolling checkpoint is not exactly a new, major innovation in video games. The only difference is we kept it 100-percent integrated into the theme and the narrative of the game to never break you from the sense of immersion.

I think the fact that a lot of these other games are adopting similar philosophies to death is an indication that we’re going to see a lot of this moving forward.

What was the most difficult part of rebooting the Prince of Persia franchise?

Ben: Because we changed so much, everything was new to us. We had to invent a new combat system, which was really hard. We had to solve the problem of lousy AI partners. We had to find a way to have Prince of Persia acrobatic flow in an open world, where you’re not overwhelmed and you don’t know where to go. That was really the challenge of the game’s development.

The biggest challenge was our world structure, and how we married the value of the benefits of your traditional linear, platforming elements with set pieces and on-rails sequences where the developer controls the pace with an open-world structure, where the player has more control. Creating a hybrid between those two and coming up with a network structure, a combination of sticks and bubbles that allow you to choose the pathway and how you get through the world while still giving you some set pieces, that was a real “eureka” moment for us, and it took us a full year and a half of prototyping before we came upon it, so I think that was one of our more significant development challenges.

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