Originally Posted by IGN
Prince of Persia First Look
The Prince is back -- sleeker, smarter and better than ever.
by Hilary Goldstein
May 23, 2008 - Many who played the Ubisoft hit Assassin's Creed last year probably had the same thought mid-way through the game: Boy, it'd be pretty awesome if they turned this into Prince of Persia. Well, in a way, Ubisoft Montreal has done just that. Prince of Persia is back, using an upgraded version of the Assassin's Creed engine and starting anew with a brand new Prince and a completely different storyline. Gone are Farah and the Sands of Time, replaced by what appears to be an even more interesting story and a whole new gameplay philosophy.
If you had a fondness for The Sands of Time, don't worry. Ubisoft isn't soiling the franchise in any way. In fact, the Montreal team is setting the Prince free of the shackles of the previous three titles. Though the Prince loses his time powers, he is gaining more acrobatic skills, a completely new combat system, and an open world free of the linear constraints of the previous game. Though Prince of Persia has an open world and is using the Assassin's Creed engine, don't think of it as a clone. This is POP for the new generation and it looks and feels like the perfect transition.
When the game begins, our hero is no prince. He is a vagabond, an adventurer wandering the desert in search of adventure. While chasing his runaway donkey, the Prince (for lack of a better name) gets lost in a sandstorm. When the dust clears, he finds himself in an oasis, a Garden of Eden. The walled garden has a centerpiece -- The Tree of Life.
Millennia ago, two brothers, both gods, went to war. Ahriman was the bad one, a being of darkness who spread "The Corruption" across the land. It was his brother Ormazd who finally defeated him, trapping Ahriman and his corruption into the Tree of Life. There he has remained trapped for 200 generations. The garden and the tree were once guarded by a long lineage of warriors, but the guardians' numbers have slowly dwindled almost to nothing. Moments after his arrival, the Prince witnesses the destruction of the Tree of Life, which sets free Ahriman.
The good news is that the walls of the oasis can still contain Ahriman. But the corruption finds cracks in the wall and spreads slowly into the rest of the world. Soon enough, Ahriman will be free and the world will be lost. That is, unless the Prince and his mysterious new companion, Elika, can force the corruption back into the garden.
The artistic design is "credible fantasy."The corruption is everything dangerous and evil in this world. It takes the form of your enemies and molds into the traps that attempt to end the Prince. There are no saw blades, no spiked floors this time around. There is only the corruption, a black ooze which dynamically changes as you play through Prince of Persia. It may form a puddle of ooze below you so that if you fall it consumes and kills the Prince. Or it may try to grab you as you pass by. Or it might infect you. Or explode out of a wall. The variations in the Corruption are something Ubisoft is keeping under wraps for now, but its ability to change as you progress through POP is going to make a huge difference in how you play.
The oasis acts as your hub world. From there you can head to the various locations in Prince of Persia at your discretion. You choose which areas to save first. This choice makes a big difference. At first, the corruption is only just barely spreading. So the first area you go to heal will have some traps forcing you to pull off a few acrobatic moves, but nothing too sinister. As you heal locations, the holes in the garden wall grow bigger and the corruption pushes further into the remaining lands. Clearing an area basically pushes the corruption closer and closer together, making the final areas far more densely covered.
Because you decide where to go, the order in which you save the world is going to drastically change your game experience. You and a friend could both beat POP going in completely opposite directions and therefore having completely unique experiences with every single land. For example, one of the bosses you face releases a corruption trap across the unhealed areas of the world when he dies. This trap remains for the rest of the game, only disappearing when an area is healed. So if you fight this boss first, it means you will ratchet up the acrobatic difficulty for the remainder of gameplay. Take him out last and the trap becomes somewhat negligible.
Because the corruption dynamically changes, you can pass through the same area multiple times and encounter completely different challenges. One of the negatives about creating an open world is that it inevitably leads to some backtracking. But in POP, there is a promise that passing through a town in hour one of gameplay will be quite different than doing so four hours later.
Spread throughout the world are vista points. These high areas give you a view of the game world. From this vantage point, you can easily see the areas that are healed and those overrun with corruption. Don't think of these as the Eagle Eye points from Assassin's Creed. This isn't like sitting atop a church and looking down on the street. This is getting up on a hillside and looking down over a valley.
Though we weren't shown much of Prince of Persia, we saw enough to know that this is as open a world as Assassin's Creed. Only you now have the Prince's incredible acrobatic ability and a design focused on testing those skills from start to finish. The Prince runs along walls, swings off poles and does any number of aerial moves you'd expect from the series. Of course, he also has some new tricks up his sleeve.
The Prince wears a gauntlet on his left hand with clawed fingers. Not only is this a combat weapon, but it's also a tool used in conjunction with his acrobatics. With the gauntlet you can perform a gripfall. The Prince digs his claws into a wall and slides down slowly. You have full lateral movement during a gripfall. You can dodge corruption traps as you gripfall, then leap off the wall at any time. This is also your only real save against missing a jump, since you can no longer rewind time. The gripfall move is a slick addition and looks to be a major component to traversing the environment.
Acrobatics are only half of the Prince puzzle. Of course there is always going to be combat. In the last-gen versions of Prince, the challenge was often to fight a half-dozen enemies at once using a variety of weapons. Things are completely different for the new POP -- and from our first glance at a fight, the changes are all for the better.
The Prince is using gripfall. And yes, that is a screenshot.The Prince wields a long, slender sword in his right hand, the clawed gauntlet in the left. These are his weapons. He doesn't upgrade the sword in any way. This isn't a game about creating the uber weapon. This is a story of a nomad becoming a great hero. It's about the Prince more than the tools at his disposal.
Instead of using the quantity of enemies to test the Prince, it's now a matter of quality. You will never face more than one enemy at a time. Never. It is always a one-on-one battle. But this time around your enemies are smarter. Often they are equally skilled in combat as the Prince -- and sometimes more so. The cinematic battles take inspiration from fighting games. These are intense, sometimes epic battles that will test the Prince's skills with a sword.
We watched the Prince take on hunter, a horrific-looking creature of corruption with a nasty scissor hand. The two clashed blades, the hunter often blocking the Prince's direct attacks. At one point, the hunter got the best of the Prince and slammed his face against a wall. The Prince managed to push off and gain some spacing. The two continued to lock blades in a duel worthy of Errol Flynn.
Each face button acts as a type of attack and each can link into a combo. Rather than having any sort of ultimate combo like God of War's "light, light, heavy" attack, Prince promises a more fluid system. You can mix and match as you like. It's hard to judge how well this works without playing POP, but just from looking at a battle, it seems very intuitive. Ubisoft claims that you can pull off 15-hit combos with its system, which is quite a bit more than you could pull off in the previous Prince games. The goal is to allow for maximum creativity in combat and a fluidity that matches the Prince's athletic prowess.
Enemies won't be pushovers.There are several reasons Ubisoft chose to go for a mano-y-mano combat system. It gives the team far more freedom with the camera. The camera can pull in closer and give cinematic views and there's no need for a lock-on system. And because your attention is focused on just one guy, the AI can be stronger, that single enemy more capable. This also harkens back to the original PC Prince of Persia, which had you fighting a single enemy at a time.
As is the hot trend, the HUD in Prince is almost non-existent. You have no mini-map and no health bar. In fact, you don't really have health. As it was explained to us, the new POP takes a lot from the original Jordan Mechner creation. In the original, you couldn't absorb many hits before dying. In the new POP, you can take one or two hits before being at death's door. We're not sure exactly how this will play out over the course of a long game, but we were assured that there will be a few counter-measures to save players from that final killing blow.
You may be wondering what Elika's role is in all of this. Well, you will have to keep wondering for just a little bit longer. We can only say that Elika is an integral part of Prince of Persia and plays a role in all facets of the gameplay. We'll be able to reveal her in full next Wednesday.
As you can see from the screenshots, Prince of Persia is a complete visual departure from the previous titles. It is not cel-shaded. Ubisoft calls its look "illustrative." Where cel-shading tends to look flat, POP looks in every way three-dimensional and there is an impressive amount of detail. This stylized look is more like watching a painting come to life.
The Prince has hops.The new Prince of Persia feels in every way a successor to Sands of Time. Despite the numerous changes, Ubisoft Montreal managed to keep the essence of POP intact. While longtime Prince fans may have trouble adjusting to the new visual style and combat system, we think they'll come around. Once you see Prince in action, you'll get it.
We'll have more on Prince of Persia and specifically Elika's role on Wednesday, May 28.
