The Prince of Persia remake is still in the early stages of development, and the action game won’t be at June’s Ubisoft Forward event, producer Jean-Francois Naud said. The news is something of a surprise, coming as it does three years after the action game’s first reveal and one year after Ubisoft moved the project to Ubisoft Montreal to help smooth out development issues.
Apparently that smoothing out involved going back to the concept stage.
“Since [Ubisoft Montreal] took over the project, we’ve been looking at feedback from the community and finding our own way of delivering the game,” Naud said. “Now, we’re building up the team, defining the priorities, putting prototypes together, testing elements, and looking at how we can include community feedback in the development as well. It’s still in an early stage, and players should not expect to hear more about the game this year, but rest assured that we’re all putting our strengths and heart into this project.”
Game director Michael McIntyre said one of the team’s biggest challenges is figuring out how to preserve the Prince’s unique movement abilities from the original, while still meeting player expectations for how modern games should play and feel – hence the need for a full remake and not just a polished remaster.
Naud said the team was fortunate to have access to extensive documentation and other research materials that helped understand the original development team’s intentions, including what vital aspects of Prince of Persia’s identity have to be preserved.
McIntyre said these include puzzles, combat, and the Prince’s acrobatic hijinks, but the most important part is Sands of Time’s “story within a story” feel, with a narrator relaying important events to you in storybook fashion.
The Ubisoft Forward event airs on June 12, 2023, and we’ll probably see a good deal of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, among other things.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF