Prince of Persia remains a hot property for French publisher Ubisoft and the upcoming release this spring of Jerry Bruckheimer's movie based on the Sands of Time will likely further raise the profile of the franchise and potentially boost sales of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which releases around the same time in May.
The more recent release of Prince of Persia took the franchise in an interesting direction with cel-shaded graphics and more accessible/forgiving gameplay. That could be seen as a positive or a negative, but it didn't seem to appeal to the original Sands of Time audience, and Ubisoft wants to change that with Forgotten Sands. Interestingly, the company believes that the rise of the God of War franchise has had a direct impact on the Prince of Persia series. While God of War has relatively challenging gameplay, the fight sequences in Prince of Persia have always been somewhat tame. It seems the hardcore wants a challenge.
Ubisoft animation director Jan-Erik Sjovall told CVG that the publisher has "lost so many Prince of Persia players to God of War" in part because of this difference in difficulty. "When we make questionnaires and we ask, 'what did you play in the past?' The answer's 'Prince of Persia'. 'What do you play now?' 'God of War'. 'Would you play Prince of Persia again?' 'No, it's not hard enough'," Sjovall stated. "So the idea [with Forgotten Sands] was clearly that we'd try to bring our old audience back, but also we're winning a new audience."
Some of these same players also seem to want more gore in Prince of Persia, similar to what's found in God of War, but Sjovall isn't so sure about how far Ubisoft will push it. "A lot of people ask, 'will you have gore in the game?' It'd [be] fairly interesting. We want to have interesting fight sequences in there but not indulge in the violence like God of War does," he said. "We want to keep it interesting so the acrobatics, the story and the whole look are all supporting each other and people go, 'yeah, I want to play that game'."
