Written by Jeff Buckland, 1/9/2009
Prince of Persia is one of 2008's most brilliant games, but recently it's not been seen like that at all. Many gamers hate the idea of it entirely and will scoff when they hear you can't die in it. Even the basic plot seems too girly and tree-huggery, and so we've seen hardcore gamers shun even the possibility of trying it. But does this game deserve all the hate? I don't think so, and I'm going to dive into what I feel are the successes and failures of Ubisoft Montreal's latest action game.
Why not the Wii?
Here's something you may not know: your non-gamer friends and family members hate video game controllers. They're almost afraid of them, as if pressing the red button is going to cause the house next door to catch on fire or something. The 360 and PS3 gamepads are chock full of buttons, sticks, and triggers, rumble packs and flashing lights, and many game developers are trying their hardest to smooth out that learning curve, but at some point even if you tell someone "you only have to press one button!" and start to hand them a controller, there are still people out there who will shy away. After a few hours of playing Prince of Persia, you'll realize that Ubisoft Montreal really tried to make playing it pretty simple - left stick to move, face buttons to do everything, optionally the right stick will adjust the camera.
It doesn't get much simpler than that for a modern-day action game, and all four face buttons do something contextually different based on whether you're fighting, jumping, running, or standing there. Yet, there's still that pressure a non-gamer feels when the controller is offered to them, where they don't want to look like an idiot and this person is handing some curved, alien, complex thing to them that they have no idea how to use. The question is this: was Prince of Persia released on the wrong platforms? It was on the PC, PS3, and 360, while the console with the simplest controls, the Wii, was ignored by Ubisoft. And the Wiimote and Nunchuk could control PoP very easily, too.
But part of this is also the growing divide between not just people who do and don't play games, but those who play them casually and those who play them, well, a lot more. I'm sure that Ubisoft didn't port the game to the Wii because they'd have to compromise a ton on the graphics, bringing down the resolution of the textures and the screen to get the game running on Nintendo's more modestly-equipped console. But it's the console manufacturers' fault and that of the whole market that this problem even exists. Why can't the Wiimote work on the 360? Why can't we get both great graphics and intuitive control options?
This all is fine to ask, but when it comes to Ubisoft's decision to release this game on the PS3 and 360 and not the Wii, it shows that they missed at least part of their audience. Prince of Persia is an amazingly accessible game, yet the gamers who own these consoles don't necessarily care. They know how to run and jump, they can hit a trigger while pushing a button and yanking a stick. They know what a quarter-circle motion is. Ubisoft made a mistake in trying to sell an accessible game to people who didn't need accessibility. That's not the fault of the game's lead designers - they made a highly original and innovative game - but this basic marketing failure is the fault of the higher-ups in the company.
What's with the story?
Do gamers really want long-winded plots? For some reason, some people found the Prince's ability to continue conversations past just what's required to somehow be a bad idea. Some argued that the plot was stupid so why would they want to even hear one word of it, while others argued that having to push a button repeatedly to get the full story was goofy and that it should just go through while the player had an option to press a button to skip the plot. But is that latter option really the best way? Maybe the Prince, this time around, isn't so inquisitive. Maybe he just wants to get this mission done and be as quiet as the game lets him be. By making the player dive deeper, it gives him or her more choice than just dishing out all the dialogue and giving the player the option to skip it. It also makes the whole experience a lot less jarring for someone who doesn't want to necessarily hear every spoken line in the game.
A harder edge?
Let's face it - the plot of Prince of Persia is not exactly the most badass thing you've heard. Elika and the Prince must run and jump through a land corrupted by Ahriman to heal the Fertile Grounds. With each one healed, the surrounding area changes to a beautiful, life-filled place where Light Seeds must then be collected so that Elika can gain magical powers and move on to the next corrupted areas. Nope, there are no chainsaws attached to the front of the guns, nor are there any guns at all. Enemies are few and far between, and while you do fight them with a sword, the protagonist does a lot of acrobatic flips and combo moves where he tosses a woman around and she fires magical crap at the enemies.
To someone who just finished a solid session of Fallout 3 - where a good challenge is to find an eyeball after exploding someone's head with a stack of money fired from a vacuum cleaner that has a leaf blower attached to it - this probably seems really lame. It turns out that the corrupted areas of the world and the enemies you fight are pretty devious and actually fun to go up against, but for a gamer like this, the game never gets there. There's some crap about Fertile Grounds, oh God I have to run where?, you know what I think I'll just put Fallout 3 back in. If it hasn't happened to you, you know someone it would happen to.
This is not the fault of the headshot-desiring gamer. They've been desensitized; they've played hundreds, maybe thousands of games, they've admired quite a few bits of shiny lights and cool reflections, and things like "art" in a video game are zoomed past in search of the next thing that helps the player finish the area and move on to the next. If anything, Ubisoft failed to hook the gamer early with a harder-edged plot or at least people dying or something. From the time you get started on your mission to fight Ahriman to the end of the game, you'll see very few actual people. How many big Halo fans do you know that also loved Shadow of the Colossus?
