Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is designed to be difficult. It’s also designed from the ground up to be accessible. These things are not in conflict with each other. Ubisoft Montpellier has integrated accessibility options into every part of the game from the start; no one team was designated to do the work, senior game designers Christophe Pic and Rémi Boutin told Polygon in advance Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown‘s Innovation in Accessibility win at The Game Awards 2024. Against Call of Duty: Black Ops6, Diablo 4, Dragon Age: The Veil Guardand another Ubisoft game Star Wars Outlawsthe Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team set a new standard for accessibility in the brutal Metroidvania genre – and was rewarded for it.
“Some developers may fear that accessibility can weaken your game’s strengths, and I think the opposite is true with all of our accessibility features,” Boutin told Polygon in a sit-down interview ahead of the show. “We let more players enjoy exploration, more players enjoy combat. And in the end, when we read the reviews, the game was still considered very, very challenging. It’s the nature of the game and the controls that make this feeling possible; What is unique about it is the feeling of freedom and fluidity of its movement. “Our controls provide instant fun 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 to an instant hit with critics, and was the first major Prince of Persia game since its 2010 release Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. There was a lot of pressure to get the game right. “We started with the DNA first, 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 game director Mounir Radi told Polygon.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown indeed has many features that players have come to expect from games, such as multiple difficulty levels, subtitles and aim assist. But where Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Lost CrownThe company’s accessibility is best reflected in how the development process – accessibility built into every step – allowed developers to innovate. Boutin pointed to this process as the explicit reason for some options, such as the high contrast switch. A first for Ubisoft: the high-contrast mode affects colors and contrast. One developer noted that the mode ruined certain story details during the movie, such as an enemy becoming an ally, for example. (All data in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are internally tagged so that a mode like this can be properly applied to different items.) The developer then added an option to disable the cinematic toggle so players can avoid being spoiled. “These kinds of details are part of the fact that everyone was involved in accessibility,” said Boutin.
The big 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. And so the team developed guided mode to help with that. “It was a little tricky because we want the player to get lost,” Pic said. “It’s important because it’s research-driven. We want the player to explore for themselves 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 primary objectives are on the map, but the route there has yet to be explored.
“We have retained the essence of the thrill of discovery,” Boutin added. “We know some players drop some games because they hate being lost, but they miss the feeling of exploration. That is what motivated the creation of the screenshot marker.”
The screen markers appear Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are called memory shards, which allow players to take screenshots and pin them to the map. It’s like writing something in a diary, but directly on the screen. Boutin had already thought about how a photo mode could be used in gameplay, and when the Ubisoft team implemented the prototypes, it just worked, albeit with some limitations. (Boutin added that the screenshot feature was originally more complicated, and it took some time and iteration to bring it back to the 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 by default throughout the game – as part of the original design process, involving all developers involved. Initially there was some reluctance within the team about this, but everyone was on board when they saw how the process worked; everyone had input. To be nominated for this award, among other games with innovative design (Boutin specifically mentioned Diablo 4‘s screen descriptions) – and then to win – is a reminder that the process works.
Although the Ubisoft team that worked on it Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has disbanded and continues with projects like Ghost Recon, Rayman and Beyond good and evil 2the team members are extremely proud of the work they have done. Radi confirmed this to Polygon Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sold over 1 million copies, but an Insider Gaming report from October suggested that the game fell short of Ubisoft’s internal expectations.
“To be honest, we’ve had a tough year with Ubisoft,” Radi said. “Every month is a new problem. But with these nominations it is our way of showing what kind of game we can achieve when we work together and with our hearts.”