Games interview: Prince of Persia 2

Posted on 3 Aug 2004 at 10:57

Prince of Persia 2 launches toward the end of the year on PC and console, but we recently got to check out the latest code and grill producer Yannis Mallat.

Interview conducted by John Houlihan.

What have you improved on from the original game and what are your aims for Prince of Persia 2?

Mallat: The very first thing we did starting Prince of Persia 2 was to look back at Prince of Persia one and really look deeply at what was not up to what we wanted the game to be. And from that we have identified three main areas...

...The fighting system, which was pretty redundant and repetitive, and no real variety in the enemies and stuff like that. We didn't have any bosses in Sands of Time and the game length was a little short, but especially we didn't have any replay value system.

That's pretty much the three big things we've worked on. Adding some real depth to the micro gameplay, starting with the fight system where we really wanted to give the player the control of the Prince rather than having the player triggering... Cool moves and animations are to be enjoyable to watch but we felt that this voyeurism trip was not what real gamers may expect from the game.

It had an advantage though, which we have been trying to keep and have kept which was that the control scheme was really intuitive which is a trademark in any P.O.P. game.

Can you tell us more about these areas of improvement?

Mallat: We've been doing a lot of trial and error to give controls to the player but also to not go too deep into hardcore stuff. We're going to have combos - even if I don't like the word - that will allow the player to really choose what he or she wants the Prince to do. We have more than 25 different combos, and a dozen are finishing moves.

Going deeper into the fight system, we are also giving the Prince the ability to fight with two swords. We've freed up one hand that was taken up by the dagger. And then the Prince also has the ability to steal secondary weapons from enemies using cool moves - like strangulation moves - which is really what I call intuitive gameplay. This is giving depth to the fight system.

Replay value - we're going to a have minimum of four different difficulty levels plus one huge thing I cannot talk about at this time [laughs] but I have to mention it - it will really give the player the desire and the opportunity to play the game again a different way.

And finally we have at least three different bosses in the game. These ask for what we call exotic gameplay, meaning you don't fight those guys the same way you fight all the other enemies. They call for specific gameplay, such as the huge golem where you have to find his weak point then climb on his back and do some rodeo stuff and smashing the head and finishing him in a very special way.

The game engine for Prince of Persia 2 is 25 percent more powerful than that of the original. What work have you done here?

Mallat: This is something we really didn't think could happen because the engine at the end of Sands of Time was at its maximum in terms of power and stuff. Last year I remember when meeting with Sony people and they were telling me about the PS2 capabilities and our game engine is matching the PS2 capabilities. Good to know, but we managed to improve the engine a lot - 25 percent more power to compute faster, 25 percent more in terms of memory usage and in terms of allocating different stuff to the CPUs in PS2.

It allows for more room, more textures, more special effects and stuff and the game running at a minimum of 30 frames per second which is cool because I don't think we have a game that needs to run at 60 frames per second. But going at 30 is allowing us to add a lot of stuff. Animation is taking a lot of memory in the game and I think it's something like 796 animations we have for the Prince alone. We've been able to add 150 animations in terms of new moves and that's thanks to the engine optimisation.