Ubisoft's Prince of Persia released late last year to critical acclaim, and the game has sold well for the French publisher as well, totaling over 2.2 million units worldwide. As highly rated as this reinvention of the Prince of Persia franchise was, the game took a fair share of criticism too. Many complained about it being too easy or too repetitive and others didn't like the controversial ending.

IndustryGamers recently had a chance to talk with the game's producer Ben Mattes about some of these issues and how the game's casual difficulty really lends itself to Wii.

IndustryGamers: We know there's been some criticism about the new Prince of Persia being too easy, but in some ways we felt the platforming was liberating because we could just experiment and attempt to make jumps anywhere, knowing that Elika would save the Prince from a fall. How do you view it?

Ben Mattes: That's an added value for sure. As long as people saw it that way, as "I get to experiment in risk free environments," then that's a good thing. If it's "I don't care about the game because of this," then that's not such a good thing. [The "risk free" approach] was a major part of the design of Prince of Persia. It could be argued that the major feature of Prince of Persia was elimination of frustration, and almost all of our game design choices centered around that philosophy. [We thought], "Is this going to piss people off? If so then let's redo the design" ... I think the solution is not super complicated, but it just needs to be thought of at the beginning. By the time we started to wake up to the potential that maybe there was going to be some negative backlash over how much accessibility there was in the game, it was too late. I think the difference is, for example, you have parts of the world that are only accessible if you're really good at the game. There are also light seeds that you can only collect if you find the secret passageways and the acrobatic pathways that are much more challenging.

The light seed as a mechanic was too mundane because you could finish the game without doing any of the hard stuff. So what we basically needed was a second consumable resource that you could only get if you're a really good player, doing really hard acrobatics or really tough combat situations, that you could then redeem for whatever... a sword upgrade, life upgrade, etc. Because we tried to make a video game without consumables, without a life bat, without mana, without any of that stuff – again in this interest of breaking from some of the cliches of video games and trying to do something unique and new and different – we didn't have the consumables to redeem this higher order collectable for. So one of the lessons I learned was some video game cliches are good.

IG: How did your design philosophy play into the ending, which everyone was a bit surprised by?

BM: How it tied into it was a debate about whether or not we would have a second ending... I think story driven games that have multiple endings are a mistake, because then you don't know what the real story is. Is it this or is it this or this? What we had debated doing was that the idea the encounter with Ahriman, the final boss encounter, would play out differently based on whether or not you had collected all the light orbs. If you had all or most of the light seeds, maybe the final encounter with Ahriman would be somehow different – easier, harder, whatever. In the end, we opted not to do that because in our internal focus groups a lot of people complained about failing and if they could finish the game without having enough light seeds to get the good ending, they would feel cheated. That's a really hard challenge, and I don't necessarily have the solution to that right now... how to give a diversity of experience so that the hardcore gaming set can have one experience and the "casual" gaming set can have another experience without having them feel cheated by the fact that "oh, the hardcore players get all the good stuff."

IG: What you're talking about – satisfying the casual crowd, removing frustration, etc. - and the fact that it's cel-shaded, makes Prince of Persia seem perfect for the Wii, right? Why keep it just PS3/360?

BM: The reality is that from a technical standpoint, the Wii cannot do what we wanted the game to do. The AI of Elika was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear, it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience. We didn't want to water it down that way. That said, I do agree very much that some of the people that probably would have most appreciated the design choices we made are Wii gamers. It would be really nice to be able to tap into that and give them that experience.

IG: So I guess you file that away for your next project...

BM: Yeah, a lesson to be learned moving forward. But keep in mind what the industry looked like when we started development on Prince of Persia. When we started, the Wii was [pegged] to be "everybody's second console," so if you look back at the documents and powerpoints of the business plan for the project, there were business cases for not doing the Wii version and for why the design philosophy of the Wii nation is suitable for the 360 and PS3, because in our minds everyone was going to have both. If they had a Wii in the same household, they were going to have a PS3 or 360 as well. And that obviously didn't happen with every Wii.

I actually think Prince of Persia is the ultimate gateway drug for video games. My wife hates video games – she's never liked them – but she sat around for hours watching me play Resident Evil 4, and she almost finished Prince of Persia. The only reason she didn't finish it was I kicked her off so I could play Fallout. I was sick of watching her play a game I've been f**king watching for the last three years. But after that, we played together Castle Crashers and LittleBigPlanet, and now suddenly she's the coming to me asking if I've got any new games.

IG: In terms of the character interactions and connecting the player on a more emotional level with the in-game characters, have you thought about trying to utilize the voice technology Ubisoft implemented for End War? That would seem like an interesting way to enhance the connection to characters, and it's something not possible in movies...

BM: I think that would be really interesting, but not last year. I don't think Ubisoft would have wanted to steal the thunder of End War by shoehorning this tech into Prince of Persia just because it had the potential to push the emotional engagement a little bit further, but I do think you'll probably see more and more usage of voice recognition technology as the ultimate in accessible end-user interfaces. The thing that's going to be very difficult about that – and this is just a technical problem – is how to make sure [the game understands you]. If you go into an IRC channel with a Turing test bot, you realize this is a bot – you can't converse because it's answers feel clumsy, mechanical, wooden. That is like the ultimate in the uncanny valley, applied to dialogue, which I think will be every bit as off-putting for people.

If I say to Elika, "Help Elika! I need your help!" and the system wanted me to say "Help, help Elika" and it doesn't parse properly and she doesn't understand, the emotional connection could be irreplaceably lost. Frustration leads very quickly to resentment. ... That was something we were very conscious of with Elika in Prince of Persia, this reality that the second the player resents Elika, even once, because she fell down a hole or didn't get up fast enough when she got knocked out in combat or whatever, they're not going to be in the emotional space we need them to be in for our ending to work. Our game was designed to be some forgivable and accessible that we really expected and ending up seeing a high percentage of people finishing the game; it was really designed for people to experience the ending. We made certain design decisions to eliminate the resentment or potential for resentment with Elika to make sure once the player got to the ending they would be in the emotional space we wanted them to be in.

IG: Thanks Ben.

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