Interviews
Das Gamer Interview: Ben Mattes, Producer Of Prince Of Persia
July 01, 2008
The Prince of Persia franchise re-erupted on the last generation of hardware, and Ubisoft recently took the wraps off their first next-gen Prince of Persia with some surprising results. First off, this is a completely new prince that actually starts out as a nobody. This game has nothing to do with the Sands of Time storyline, or the upcoming 2009 movie. With a phenomenal fresh take on cel-shaded art, to a new A.I. controlled counterpart, we’re dying to get our hands on it. But so far, all we have to go on is a trailer and a few screenshots.
Even though Ubisoft is keeping most of the game under wraps, we demanded more. For this game, former Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones producer Ben Mattes is back at the helm and he gives us a good idea in what to expect in Ubisoft’s first foray into a next-gen Prince of Persia. Read the full interview after the jump.
Das Gamer: Where does this game fit in the franchise, and what you guys are doing with it?
Ben Mattes: What we’re doing is reinitializing and re-kick-starting the franchise. We’re starting fresh in a lot of areas in order to make sure that our next-gen debut is a real bang. It’s not just a sequel - we are re-imagining the franchise for next-gen. We have certain brand fundamentals that we don’t need to change as drastically because they work. You’ve got your young hero, who is a swordsman. He’s very athletic, agile, and can run on walls. He can run and jump and flip and fight. He does combat, acrobatics, puzzles -you know, those kinds of brand pillars - those are still there.
But then we’re really sort of departing from other elements that people sometimes assumed were intrinsically connected with the Prince of Persia franchise that we didn’t necessarily think we needed to rely on any more. A perfect example of this is the Sands of Time - we’ve closed that chapter for now. I mean, the Sands of Time was a really cool story and part of the Prince of Persia universe, and maybe we’ll want to return to that some day in the future - but for now, that chapter is closed. It’s a new Prince, new environments, a new enemy, and a new quest.
So at least from what my understanding is the old Prince team went to do Assassin’s Creed, and this a new Prince team?
Ben Mattes: After Sands of Time the core team that was sort of the original creators of Sands of Time went on to do Assassin’s Creed. The second core team came up, stepped up and became the main core team for The Warrior Within and Two Thrones together and now we’re doing the new Prince of Persia. This is now their fourth Prince of Persia game together, so they know the franchise very, very well.
Now will this be tied in at all with the movie?
Ben Mattes: No correlation whatsoever, I mean the movie is going to be called Sands of Time. From what I can tell they’re playing with the whole time control mechanism. Jordan Mechner wrote the script and I’m pretty sure he based elements off of the original Sands of Time game that he co-collaborated on with Ubisoft. But like for us, that’s part of the chapter of Sands of Time that’s closed. I’ll have to wait until I see the movie, but it has no sort of connection chronologically or even thematically with this game. You can imagine it as another tale in the 1001 Arabian Knights sort of thing. That’s how I see our relation to the movie.
So as you’re rebooting this franchise, who are the main characters and what’s the story about?
Ben Mattes: The Prince is obviously the main hero, but he’s not actually a prince yet. He starts out as an adventurer and evolves into the Prince. But he starts out just as a guy who’s is wandering around from adventure to adventure, living hand to mouth, if you will. He stumbles into this sand storm and when this sand storm blows away he finds himself in this magical oasis that has no rightful reason to be there in the middle of the desert. Before he knows what’s happening this beautiful young woman named Elika runs into him, grabs his hand and says “You’ve got to help me, these guards are chasing me, you’ve got to help me escape.” The Prince says why not? Pretty young lady asking for help, lets see where this goes….
As they run away from the guards, they come into the center of this oasis and see this gigantic Tree of Life. The Prince quickly learns the back story of this Tree of Life. An ancient evil god of corruption and chaos called Ahriman had been imprisoned in that tree for eternity, and Elika is part of a bloodline of guardians called Ahuras whose job it is to protect this tree and keep Ahriman from escaping. As soon as they arrive, of course, something goes wrong, the tree goes down, Ahriman escapes and he immediately corrupts this entire oasis, killing any thing that’s in there driving all life, and light, and goodness, if you will, out of the world and really infecting it into this sort of dark, chaotic, sort of corrupted wasteland.
Elika as an Ahura, sort of kicks into overdrive mode. Elika’s job from generation to generation has been passed down the responsibility to keep exactly this type of thing from happening. She enlists the Prince’s help to systematically drive the corruption out of the world by using this newly untapped magical power she suddenly discovers she has to heal the world sort of bit by bit. By going to the healing ground, Elika’s magic power, a healing magical energy drives all the corruption out of that area sort of pushing it into the rest of the world. You do this again, and again, until there’s nowhere for the corruption to go except back into the Tree of life. Seal up the Tree of Life and Ahriman is once again contained. That is the goal and the quest they play throughout this game.
So now with this new female character you are introducing a new A.I. co-op situation. How’s that going to work?
Ben Mattes: So Elika is a 100% A.I. controlled support character. She is there to support the Prince in this quest that he takes on his shoulders. Even though she’s the Ahura, she can’t do it alone. She needs the Prince to help her because he’s stronger, he’s faster, he’s more powerful, etc. The A.I. behind Elika is integrated into every element of game play, so it’s not just a story telling mechanism or something there for the character to kind of think “Well, oh she’s hot” kind of thing and have a story moment with her.
She does acrobatics with the Prince cooperatively to do more spectacular moves that allows the Prince to go further and faster than he could alone. The same thing goes with puzzle solving, exploring the world, and in combat. When it comes to fighting, the Prince and Elika tag team. They’re literally cooperatively flipping off of each other, throwing each other at the enemies, and jumping off of each others backs to defeat these enemies. She’s integrated into game play in a much deeper way than we think anyone’s done in the action adventure genre before.
She’s never a negative. You’re never going to be frustrated because you’re babysitting her because she keeps getting lost or falling behind because she’s taking some initiative to do something that the A.I. thinks is smart - but in fact completely messes you up because it’s not at all what you wanted. Our sort of promise to the player is that Elika is going to only be a positive influence on their game play experience and they’re never going to have feelings of frustration or resentment towards her.
So I know that on paper this all sounds well and good, but a lot of games when they have an A.I. assist character like that, they really get in the way. The only game I can honestly think of that worked out was Alyx from Half Life 2. What challenges are you guys finding when you’re trying to pull this off?
Ben Mattes: Oh I mean it’s huge! It is, it is, but it’s one of our critical innovations so we’ve invested the resources we needed to make sure that we treat this challenge with the appropriate level of responsibility and we’ve put into this what we needed to, to make sure that we live up to our promise. Alyx is a really good example in terms of what is primarily a story telling mechanic as far as I see it. She does integrate into game play but into very, very scripted ways. She’ll shoot enemies for you and there’s some pretty interesting collaborative elements with Alyx, particularly episode one with the thing in the basement where you’ve got the flashlight and she’s got the gun. There’s a really cool synergy element that we really, really like, but having a support character work in an FPS is very, very different than in a third person action adventure game.
In the Prince of Persia, you’re doing a wall run and you hit a pole, and Elika is right behind you, so as soon as you reach the pole a second later she’s on the pole. What if you decide you want to turn around and go back the way you just came? If she’s still on the wall she’s going to be able to get out of the way, so she’s got to have the intelligence to be able to follow you in everything that you’re doing, but also to be able to get out of the way if you want to occupy the place that she’s currently occupying. All the while not dying, and looking cool while doing it. So there are a lot of challenges in making sure that every thing that the Prince can do, Elika can do as well. That she’s always on hand for the player to be able to say “Elika jump in here, I need your help, I want to do something collaboratively with you.” But that she’s not falling off the cliff or the pole, she’s not blocking an object to prevent you from being able to move past her, et cetera. The challenges are enormous but we’ve overcome most of them.
So why not go for a co-op thing?
Ben Mattes: All the cool kids are doing it! I mean, Prince of Persia is a single player game and it’s always been our focus. The more full answer to that question is that in single player Prince of Persia games rhythm and flow is critical, right? You’ve got to have that bump, bah, bah, bah… run, jump, do a wall jump, rebound, grab the pole, jump off the column, - in order take full advantage of what the game play offers. Now add another character in there who is collaborating with you in this sort of acrobatic gymnastic style where you’re running, and jumping, and flipping off of each other in this very sort of choreographed fashion. You can quite quickly see that in order to maintain that kind of flow under a traditional co-op system would be impossible because you’d never be able to guarantee that player two was going to be where you needed Elika to be. To do that double jump, that co-op jump in order to attack the enemy - you would never be able to make sure that the second player was going to be able to play the game the way you wanted them to play to have the proper Prince of Persia experience.
How are you balancing with the combat and the platform elements that people have come to know? Is it going to be a 50/50 split?
Ben Mattes: No, I mean in terms of actual numbers, we haven’t calculated it, I mean it probably tends toward something like a 60:40 or 70:30 split favoring acrobatics and platforming. It’s a world with player choice right? Where you can heal the world in any order that you want, so as you’re navigating the world there’s a lot of instances where you’re going to pass through an environment you’ve already been through before. We’re making sure that if you pass through a level multiple times that it’s not exactly the same experience every time. The game system is set up in such a way that the world evolves as you play. It dynamically changes the level design and difficulty as you’re playing through it to make sure that it feels fresh, different, and new even if you’ve passed through the environment multiple times.
Because there’s all of that exploration in terms of navigating through the world, that’s pushing the amount of platforming, exploration, and acrobatics relative to the combat. That said our ambition with this combat system is that, even though in terms of the 15-hour- play time you’re only spending 30% of your time in fights. Those fights feel so dramatic, so impactful that it’s like nothing but boss fights the whole game. Every fight feels like it’s you and Elika against a boss. It’s everything you can do to survive and it’s everything the two of you can do cooperatively and collaboratively in order to defeat this enemy. The feeling of reward that the player has from successfully completing these combat encounters more than makes up for the fact that their not slashing through hordes and hordes of enemies in order to make sure that we have a 50/50 split.
Any thoughts on adding DLC after the game is released?
Ben Mattes: Yes, we’re still thinking of some ideas for that to see if it’s something we want to explore, if it’s something that will work within our story, our game structure, and our world. There are a couple ideas we’re investigating. The question is will it add enough value to the player that we feel is worth doing. We’re not going to do V.R. style missions because they don’t belong at all in the Prince of Persia type universe - they work fine in something like Metal Gear. If we can find an idea that we really think is a value, that adds to the game play, and fits into the total package that we want to deliver, it may be something we’ll peruse.
So the big question is when are we going to see actual game play and when can we get our hands on it?
Ben Mattes: E3. E3 for sure is in game. We’re not yet going say whether or not it’s hands-on or a controlled demo - it’s still under discussion. But at E3 you will see everything I’ve been talking about today in action. You will be able judge for yourself whether or not I was telling the truth regarding Elika never getting in your way, never falling behind, and just never being a negative element.
–Billy Berghammer
