GP: How many artists did you have working on it?

Mattes: All of them. (laughs)

In total, if you count effects artist and technical artists, plus their managers, I think we were probably up at about 55. Because the thing about Prince of Persia is that nothing in it is procedurally generated. And not only that but everything is crafted for that particular location. No rock is duplicated. Every rock is specifically created for that location. And everything around it was made by hand for a variety of reasons which would take me a long time to talk about (laughs) but the end result of all of that is that everything has its place in the world.

So you really get a sense of wonder when you're in this game; when you stand around looking at all the detail in that world. I mean it's the Lord of the Rings model. You know, it's like Peter Jackson, where it's like - let's spend three months developing the story about the race and their history that allowed them to create the technology that allowed them to create a spoon that you see on camera for thirty seconds, in the corner of a shop. It's like, what? Why would you do all of that?

It's because it means that spoon was created with so much loving attention to detail that it's so much more than the sum of all it's parts, and so when you look at that shot everything fits and it really all comes together in a really strong way. And that's really one of the values of making sure everything is hand crafted and making sure you've invested that time and energy into the attention to detail and everything.

GP: With two main characters in the game was there ever a consideration to do co-op?

Mattes: Yeah, we sort of briefly explored the idea as sort of a brain game. Like we briefly talked about it for a couple of days, and sort of immediately dismissed it because first off, Prince of Persia has always been about the core single-player experience. But also because the intention with Elika and the collaboration between her and the Prince was really about you know, collaboration. This is not a hero who is babysitting some nag. This is two relatively strong individuals who, through the collaboration, become even more strong than either of them could be on their own.

The feeling we were going for from the beginning was this sort of acrobatic flow through the world. Like they had this sort of symbiotic relationship with each other, where there is this mind meld and they aways seem to be at the right place at the right time to take advantage of each other's abilities to manoeuvre through the world.

And there's no two players on the face of the planet who've got the sort of mind meld necessary to pull off that kind of choreographic acrobatic. I'd want to go this way, you'd want to go that way. We'd be fighting over the camera. I'd be wanting to go fight, you'd be looking at the water, I'd jump and you wouldn't be there to save me. It would have been a completely different game and we'd be fighting over where to go, so the pace as a third party - it would have been two steps, stop, look around with the camera, wait two minutes for them to figure out where to go, move, stop, wait again, and that's not Prince of Persia. Prince of Persia is run, wall-run, jump, swing off the pole, grab the column, swing around the column, leap off the column, grab the vines, jump, do a flip, I mean it's gotta have that rhythmic flow or it's just not Prince of Persia.

There's just no way to get that in a truly co-operative experience.

GP: What were your biggest challenges?

Mattes: I'd say there were sort of three key challenges that we had to overcome in this game, and two of them are sort of related. The first was world structure. How to make a Prince of Persia a game with player choice. I mean, how to open it up into a game that gave meaningful choices to the player and didn't overwhelm them. We literally tried creating a world like Assassin's Creed and used the Assassin's model. Like, we took the Prince's abilities and put him in a level that's designed very much like a level in Assassin's world, where you make like LEGO pieces. Like, you drop a building there, and then another one there, and then drop a rock there, and so it's placing objects and then you have your total game experience. But there was no flow. We'd playtest it and would stop and look, look, look. And people were sort of asking themselves "should I jump on that pole, or that pole, or that pole", so they were just overwhelmed with choice.

So trying to come up with this world structure which gave them choice but still sort of massaged them in the right direction so they still got that sort of acrobatic flow was a significant challenge. And we probably prototyped about three or four different world structures before arriving at our current one.

In particular with Elika I would say the challenge was more of a design one than a technology one. There's just a lot of design choices to make Elika into the kind of character that she is. So she doesn't make the kind of choices that piss you off and so she doesn't fall behind and she doesn't get in the way, but feels powerful. So that she feels sexy, but isn't like a sex object. There were a lot of decisions that had to be made in order to create that character, and so that was a big challenge.

And then I think the third one was how to tell a story that was engaging and had evolution in an open world. That's simply not an easy thing to do, and yet character and story development have always been something that are some of the hallmarks of Prince of Persia and so it was something we absolutely knew we had to do and make part of our experience.

GP: The original Prince of Persia was known for being a really challenging and punishing game for failure, and I've noticed in this one when you miss a jump or something Elika just kinda touches your hand and you start back at a close check-point. So I was wondering did you kind of ease back on the difficulty for this one to appeal to the less hardcore audience?

Mattes: Yeah, well what we tried to create was a challenging game that wasn't punishing, because if it's a punishing game only the hardest of the hardest are going to finish it. And you have no idea how frustrating it is as a developer if you spend three years of your life and tens of millions of dollars developing a game that five percent of of the people have finished; where most people have quit within the first five minutes of playing. It's like if you're a movie maker and you sit down and have your opus on screen and people walk out before the credits are rolling. I mean, it's very discouraging and it's a huge waste of money, and it means the franchise is weakened because people are going to lapse. They're not going to play the sequels.

So having people finish the game is really crucial from not just an artistic but also from a business standpoint. What we wanted to do was create a game where really the maximum number of people would finish it. And so what that means is that the beginning players, the casual players, the people new to action adventure games, they can't get too frustrated. They cannot get to the point where they just want to throw their controllers down and pull their hair out after the first few hours of gameplay, or even less potentially. At the same time you want to give enough depth and meat and alternate pathways, so that secrets and all that other stuff that the hardcore gamers are going to find as their challenges will get them their own sense of accomplishment and sense of reward.

They're going to discover things that the beginning players won't, because they simply haven't mastered the art of a Prince of Persia game like the hardcore gamers have.

That's a really delicate balancing act but I think we've pulled it off and I think you're going to see more games doing that. I mean, I don't know how many people know this or have made this connection but Mirror's Edge does exactly the same thing. I mean Mirror's Edge is going for the same thing. They want to make a game that everyone finishes. And when you die in Mirror's Edge, the only difference is that you don't have a hand that saves you, it's otherwise exactly the same save-game and rolling check point mechanic, and I think that's something you're going to see a lot more as the industry evolves because we cannot alienate these beginning players.

We have to transition them into gamers, we can't have them permanently identified as casual gamers because then all they're going to play is PopCap games (laughs).

GP: One last quick question - without giving the story away or anything, are you setting this up to be another trilogy?

Mattes: I think we developed it to have that potential, and even more so than the previous series. I mean, it was certainly created to support that. I mean, we have our whole Bible set up, but this game is still stand alone. For whatever reason, maybe it won't sell a lot, maybe we want to take our time, who knows what the future will bring, so whatever happens this game does have a defined ending. It's not just "and then... tune in next year!" (laughs).

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Our thanks to Ubisoft NZ for this interview - we have a trailer at GP Downloads (98MB) for Prince of Persia. The game is due for release on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC platforms in December this year.