Prince of Persia: Lost Crown developer on winning the Game Awards

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is designed to be tough. It is also designed, from the start, to be accessible. These things are not in contradiction with each other. Ubisoft Montpellier has integrated accessibility options into each part of the game from the start; no team was assigned to do the work, lead game designers Christophe Pic and Rémi Boutin told Polygon before Prince of Persia: The Lost CrownAccessibility innovation won at The Game Awards 2024. Facing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Diablo 4, Dragon Age: The Veilkeeperand another Ubisoft game Star Wars OutlawsTHE Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown The team set a new standard for accessibility in the brutal Metroidvania genre – and were rewarded for it.

“Some developers may worry that accessibility might dilute the strengths of your game, and I think it’s the opposite with all of our accessibility features,” Boutin told Polygon in an interview before the show. “We’re allowing more players to enjoy exploration, and more players to enjoy combat. And in the end, when we read the reviews, the game was still considered very, very difficult. It’s the nature of the game and its controls that allow this feeling; what is unique is the feeling of freedom and the fluidity of its movement. “Our controls provide immediate enjoyment and make the game easy to learn, but difficult to master,” said senior producer Abdelhak Elguess.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was released in January and was an immediate hit with critics, and it was the first major Prince of Persia game since 2010. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. There was a lot of pressure to succeed in the match. “We started with DNA, because when you attack such a big brand you have to respect the brand, but we also wanted to surprise our players,” Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown said game director Mounir Radi.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has many of the features players have come to expect from games, like multiple difficulty options, subtitles, and aim assist. But where is Ubisoft Prince of Persia: The Lost Crowns accessibility shines most in the way its development process – accessibility built into every step – has allowed its developers to innovate. Boutin pointed to this process as the explicit reason for some options, like the high contrast switch. A first for Ubisoft, high contrast mode impacts colors and contrast. One developer noticed that during cutscenes, the mode was spoiling certain story details, such as an enemy becoming an ally. (All data in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are labeled internally so a mode like this can be applied correctly to different assets.) The developer then added an option to turn off the switch for cutscenes so players can avoid being spoiled. “It’s the kind of detail that comes from everyone being involved in accessibility,” Boutin said.

The great thrill of a Metroidvania game like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is exploration. The team wanted players to feel lost, but not too lost. The team therefore developed the guided mode to help you. “It was a little tricky because we want the player to be lost,” Pic said. “It’s important because it’s focused on exploration. We want the player to explore on their own to discover everything: the treasure, the shortcuts. We developed Guided Mode to help players who aren’t used to using the map all the time like you do when playing a Metroidvania game. The main objectives are on the map, but the path to get there still depends on exploration.

“We retained the essence of the thrill of exploration,” Boutin added. “We know that some players abandon certain games because they hate getting lost, but they miss the feeling of exploration. This is what motivated the creation of the screenshot marker.

Screenshot markers in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are called memory fragments, which allow players to take screenshots and pin them on the map – it’s like scribbling something in a journal, but directly on the screen. Boutin had already been thinking about how a photo mode could be used in gameplay, and when the Ubisoft team implemented their prototypes, it simply worked, albeit with some limitations. (Boutin added that the screenshot feature was originally more complicated and it took time and iterations to narrow it down to its final version.) “It was a good way to keep the player active in observing the world,” Pic said. .

During the development process, Boutin and Pic said, the biggest lesson was the importance of distributing accessibility throughout the game by default — as part of the original design process, with all developers involved. At first there was some reluctance within the team about it, but everyone was on board when they saw how the process worked; everyone had their say. To be nominated for this award among other innovatively designed games (Boutin specifically called Diablo 4descriptors on screen) – and then win – is a reminder that the process works.

Although the Ubisoft team that worked on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was disbanded, moving on to projects like Ghost Recon, Rayman and Beyond Good and Evil 2team members are immensely proud of the work they have created. Radi confirmed to Polygon that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sold over a million copies, but an October report from Insider Gaming suggested that the game did not meet Ubisoft’s internal expectations.

“Honestly, we’ve had a tough year with Ubisoft,” Radi said. “Every month is a new problem. But with these nominations, it’s our way of showing what kind of game we can make when we work together and when we work from our hearts.