TC: PoP’s acrobatic gameplay especially has come under a lot of fire, mostly for being too simple and flowing. Since you were tasked with designing the fluid motion of the Prince, how do you feel about this last set of criticisms? Did his movement style and the way he responded to player input match with your goals for him, or do you wish you’d made changes pre-release?
FR: The game flow was exactly what we wanted, and what we had been asked to do. While many seasoned gamers expected to have more of the same, it became clear to the team that we now had a chance to learn from the criticisms from the previous trilogy and expand the experience we provided to more of our customers. While I can definitely understand many of the criticisms that have been expressed, being an avid Sands of Time fan, there is a line to draw when the game as good as many have found it to be becomes a burden to many others and remains unfinished.
Do I think we went a little overboard? Yes absolutely. But the changes I would make now don’t necessarily impact the fluidity of the gameplay in terms of pure platform placement. The structure of the game imposed this kind of approach. The changes would include not counting on the story to deliver the traps one by one, rather have all of them in all the maps from the get go. That way you insure that all players have the same experience. As it stands, people may be extremely lucky and get to the specific points the traps are released at the very end, making a majority of the game essentially traps free.
But again, the major change in the structure brought the approach to the platform placement. This is where the huge difference in having a semi open world comes to light. When you need all your maps to go both ways (challenge parts excluded), there is only so much height variation you can impose on the player for instance.
Eventually many of the changes I’m talking about here made their way in the upcoming DLC, to be released on Feb. 26th. This DLC is about as close to going back to the roots of the Sands of Time structure as you could possibly get in this universe. The DLC is a lot tougher, even for us developers, and it proved an absolute blast to make and play.
TC: Elika was obviously integral to the story, but she was also key to the game’s “no death, no reloading” mentality. Did this mechanic arise out of her importance within the story, or was her narrative place cemented by her constant gameplay presence?
FR: I really think you can’t separate the two. One impacts the other. In all games with a sidekick, you need to justify their presence one way or the other. Many games have gone the cut-scene way, with various NPCs telling you what to do. Others like Zelda Ocarina of Time gave you Navi to call her at any time you like.
The first solution takes you away from your game, while the second becomes essentially useless after a while, and on top of this imposes some very painful camera shots from time to time.
Elika is a lot more than this. She does provide the same story elements a cut-scene would, but she doesn’t stop you until you reach key moments where we thought we should take the time to introduce more of the story and gameplay elements, like the introductions of certain tower levels. And she also is a Navi of sorts, by having a lot more in depth stories to tell about the world, should the player want them.
I really love Elika’s implementation for all the points above. I think she absolutely never hinders your progress, and there is something to be said there for being one of the very few games ever to accomplish that.
At the same time, Elika proved troublesome on other fronts. From a purely gameplay point of view, the player needs to wait for her to follow in your footsteps, and reaching ingredients like a crack or a grip cuts the game flow, regardless of the beautiful animations. I knew back then when I synched the traps together in my levels that if I felt that, the players would too. And synching traps became difficult when we found ways to time our inputs so we wouldn’t have to wait for her….
Finally, the whole argument about Elika saving you all the time from dying is unwarranted. I don’t exactly know where this originally came from, but it was clear to all of us that Elika’s “save me” sequence was purely a checkpoint in disguise. Let’s face it, we haven’t played a game that actually lets you die in over a decade. Some explicitly stated they still need a “You failed” death screen to give them a sense of reward for finally finishing a sequence, I would rather give the player more fun actually playing the game and getting them right back in the action.
TC: The various colored pads that are scattered around the environment are all point-to-point methods of travel, none of them are used for freeform traveling. Did you ever toy with the idea of making some of them more open-ended (like the blue flying pad), or would that have created too many opportunities for players to escape from the map or the simulation?
FR: Prince of Persia is a platforming game first and foremost, and having open ended magical plates like this would only mean breaking up the flow of the player’s inputs. There is only so many different cases us level designers can take into account before a level becomes a maze of intricate ways that frustrate everyone.
I’m not so much concerned with the fact it only gets you from point A to point B like any other platform element would, rather with HOW it does it and what you the player get to do while playing. I like the green plates a lot and would like to toy with other gravity defying moves like this in the future, should I ever work again on a Prince of Persia title.
TC: The upcoming Prince of Perisa DLC contains additional conversations and character development between the Prince and Elika. This was by far my favorite part of PoP. Was the story section of the DLC designed concurrently with PoP, or did you all take a look at the game and think, “ok, we have more story we want to tell, but not in a sequel?”
FR: I think the question of a sequel didn’t really come into play here. None of the DLC was planned, written or produced before shipping the first game. I personally had a hard time leaving our characters and world behind like this, and when I heard a DLC was thought of, I jumped on the occasion to delve more into it and produce additional levels. We really took the early criticisms from the game to heart, and changed as many things as we could given the time constraints.
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