Some Joystiq readers have voiced concern over the new prince and his voice acting. They're like, "Who is this guy?"
Han Solo is the prince. When we looked through the list of characters ... this is a big subject right here – you just tapped into a very big subject. We could go all day! First and foremost, who the prince is: the prince this time around is not the Sands of Time prince, he's not the Warrior Within prince, he's not the Two Thrones prince. There is no "THE prince of Persia." Anyone who says on a forum, "Whatever, he may be cool, but he's not the prince" needs a smack. Because ... says who?
The prince of Persia is not a single individual. If you look a the history of the franchise, there was one prince who existed over the course of the Sands of Time trilogy, and every other time it was a different prince. The ultimate inspiration for the prince of Persia came from 1001 Arabian Nights. If you read that book, there's no chronological connection between any of these stories. It's not the same hero spread across 10 chapters like traditional modern literature. It's one adventure with one hero and one villain, another adventure, and so on.
It's only in consuming and appreciating all of those separate and relatively distinct stories that you get the full appreciation for the universe of 1001 Arabian Nights. That's exactly the mode that prince of Persia has always been based on. We really consider it to be a gigantic book of Persia. They're all sort of these alternate universe stories of a young hero who runs and jumps and flips and fights his way through saving the world in a fantasy Persian environment. Every chapter deals with that core theme, but with different subjects and different ideals, different morals and different lessons.
"If he starts out noble ends up noble, I'm sorry, but that's a boring character." |
If in 15 hours you evolve from an unwilling hero to a truly epic hero by the end of the game, your personality's going to change a lot. So we needed a starting point for our character that people could identify with, that showed his potential for heroic deeds from the very beginning, but gave us room to show character growth. Because if he starts out noble at the beginning and he ends up noble at the end, I'm sorry, but that's a boring character. I don't care how much up and down you have in the middle, if you start and end on the same point, it sucks. It's not interesting.
So we had to look at pop culture and movies and try and find a reference character that had that sort of personality. He starts out a little selfish, a little rouge, a little self-centered, evolves towards something more noble. Han Solo. Heart of gold, super-selfish, and the ultimate definition of the unwilling hero. He does the right things for the wrong reasons. He's doing it for money; he's not doing it for the sake of the Rebel Alliance, he's not doing it for the sake of the universe. He's doing it because he's a mercenary. By the end, he's a truly noble hero, a truly epic hero because he's doing the right things for the right reasons.
About the combat – it seems to have changed and evolved from the first time we played the game at E3?
What's changed is ... in our combat system, there are four levels of abilities, shall we say, that the enemies have. The first is just the combos they're going to throw at you. Sword-slinging attacks. Those evolve as the game progresses. They start doing more varied combos, particularly focused more on faster attacks that are harder to deflect.
The second thing that evolves as the game progresses is the enemy's intelligence or strategy, if you will, in terms of using the environment. They will try and push you off the ledge more, they will try and push you up against the wall more, etc.
The two things that changed the most between when you played it and now, though, are the enemies' states and the complex attacks. The states are basically the shields that the enemy can throw up to invalidate a certain type of attack.
"Enemy tactics evolve. They start doing more varied combos, attacks that are harder to deflect."
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It's the same thing if the enemy's in the offensive state, sort of glowing and very aggressive. The only combo starter that works there is the sword. If you start with Elika, the enemy will literally throw her to the side, knocking her unconscious for a minute or so and you have to fight without her. That's the price you have to pay for having misread the situation.
Those states are one of the two differences. The other difference is the complex attacks. The little mini-games, where, for example, the enemy will jump up in the air and you have to press the "A" button to roll out of the way. Little "quick time event, specialized attacks.
Yeah, we saw a lot of those at E3.
The states and the complex attacks are one of the many systems that evolve as you play the game, in different ways depending on how you explore the world. What we did for E3, to make sure we had a really spectacular fight, is we pushed all of the complex attacks and all of the states of the enemy to the max. The difficulty level was through the roof. It took you straight to the highest level of combat difficulty almost immediately.
As you play the game now, it takes a while before an enemy has "unlocked" all of those abilities. Generally speaking, the first time you will face an enemy with all of its state powers unlocked and all of its specialized attacks unlocked is when you face that enemy in their lair. The final confrontation against that particular enemy.
We knew from day one that we needed to do something different with combat. If we go head-to-head with God of War, we're going to lose. It's that simple. They "won" that type of combat. So, "God of War, Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry 2 ... I bow down to them. You can have it. It's yours. Congratulations. We're going to do something unique."
Quite early on, we came up with the idea of the duel. The original Jordan Mechner Prince of Persia had duels and we thought that was very cool. Another reason we wanted to do duels was what we call the "Drake's Fortune Syndrome."
"We wanted the enemies to have things that made them more interesting, sort of like in Metal Gear Solid." |
"So, Drake, what'd you do today?" ... "Oh, I slaughtered about 400 Polynesian pirates." That guy must have a psychiatrist bill that's through the roof.
We think that made him feel a little big less human. A little less approachable. It was important to us that our hero didn't slaughter hordes of whatevers, because he wouldn't feel very human if he did. He would feel somehow god-like or disconnected and different from the reality of everyday life.
So we then also knew that we wanted to have enough combat encounters so you felt that combat is cool, rewarding, and interesting, but not this killing of hordes of generic grunts, and that's how we came to this idea of multiple boss encounters. We love the feeling from Shadow of the Colossus of every encounter being a boss fight and having it be really significant, we thought that was really special, really unique. We wanted to take that idea and integrate it into our game in an interesting way. From that came the idea of the Guardians.
The other thing goes back to the "shades of gray." There's no evil or good in their purest forms. There's an evil god and a good god, but humanity in this world is very much gray. We wanted the boss characters to also be in those shades of gray. We didn't want them to just be the bad guys that you kill and that's it.
We wanted them to have personalities, back stories, we wanted them to have things about them that make them interesting ... sort of like in Metal Gear Solid. The bosses in those games have their own story. It makes you care about them. They're not just there to be killed, they're there to interact with. How do you interact with them? By killing them, but at least you're interested in them and want to know more about them.
The other question was the percentage of combat – how much combat did we want to have in the game. If we are totally honest and we look back at all three Prince of Persia games, generally speaking, what did the majority of fans key into: it's platforming. That's what we do better than anyone else out there. I think we have some of the best acrobatics and the best platforming of any game on the market, particularly in this Prince of Persia. It's really our strength.
So we wanted to give most fans what they really, really wanted, which was a really strong platforming game. We also wanted to have less frequent, more spectacular battle encounters, so that they were really memorable. So that it stuck out in your mind as a "set piece" moment. We also like it because it make the combat a sort of destination, something you look forward to. The separation of the platforming and combat is something that's actually quite intentional because it creates an interesting rhythm in the game. And we want that something different, that sense of building tension.
