Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown it is designed to be arduous. It was also designed from the ground up to be accessible. These things don’t conflict with each other. Ubisoft Montpellier has integrated accessibility options into every part of the game from the beginning; no single team was assigned to do the job, senior game designers Christophe Pic and Rémi Boutin told Polygon ahead of Prince of Persia: The Lost CrownAccessibility Innovation wins at The Game Awards 2024. Against Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Diablo 4, Dragon Age: Guardian of the Veiland another Ubisoft game Outlaws from Star Wars, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown the team set a recent standard for accessibility in the brutal Metroidvania genre – and were rewarded for it.
“Some developers may be concerned that accessibility may undermine the game’s strengths, and I believe the opposite is true for all of our features,” Boutin told Polygon in an interview ahead of the show. “We allow 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 challenging.” It’s the nature of the game and its controls that allows for this feeling; what is unique about it is the sense of freedom and fluidity of movement. “Our controls provide immediate 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 immediate critical acclaim and was the first major Prince of Persia game since 2010 Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. There was a lot of pressure to play the match well. “We started with DNA first because when attacking such a big brand you have to respect it, 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 it actually has many features that gamers have become accustomed to in games, such as multiple difficulty options, subtitles, and aim assist. But where is Ubisoft Prince of Persia: The Lost CrownThe program’s accessibility is most clearly seen in how its development process – accessibility built into every step – allowed its creators to innovate. Boutin pointed to this process as the direct cause of some options, such as the high contrast switch. For the first time in Ubisoft’s offering, High Contrast Mode affects colors and contrast. One of the developers noticed that the mode spoiled certain plot details during cutscenes, for example an enemy became an ally. (All data in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are internally tagged so that such a mode can be applied correctly to different assets.) The developer then added an option to disable the cutscenes switcher so that players can prevent themselves from having their fun spoiled. “It’s the kind of detail that goes back to the fact that everyone was committed to accessibility,” Boutin said.
The great thrill of a Metroidvania game Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is exploration. The team wanted players to feel lost, but not too lost. So the team has developed a guided mode that can aid with this. “It was a little difficult because we wanted the player to be missing,” Pic said. “It’s important because it’s based on exploration. We want the player to explore on their own and discover everything – treasures, shortcuts. We developed Guide Mode to help players who are not used to constantly using the map, like you are when playing a Metroidvania game. The main objectives are on the map, but the path to them still requires exploration.
“We retained the essence of the thrill of exploration,” Boutin added. “We know that some players quit certain games because they hate losing, but they miss the sense of exploration. That’s what motivated me to create the screenshot tag.”
Screenshot tags in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are called memory snippets, which allow players to take screenshots and pin them to the map – it’s like writing something in a journal, but directly on the screen. Boutin had already been thinking about how Photo Mode could be used in gameplay, and when the Ubisoft team implemented their prototypes, it just worked, albeit with some limitations. (Boutin added that the screenshot feature was originally more complicated and took some time and iteration to strip it down to its final version). “It was a good way to keep the player active in observing the world,” Pic said.
As Boutin and Pic said, the biggest lesson during the game’s development process was the importance of positioning accessibility features by default throughout the game – as part of the original design process that included all developers. The team was initially reticent about it, but everyone agreed once they saw how the process worked; everyone contributed. To be nominated for this award among other games with innovative design (especially the mentioned Boutin Diablo 4descriptors on screen) – and then win – is a reminder that this process works.
Although the Ubisoft team he worked on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was resolved, moving on to projects such as Ghost Recon, Rayman and Beyond good and evil 2team members are extremely proud of the work they have created. Radi confirmed this to Polygon Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sold over a million copies, but a report by Insider Gaming in October suggested that the game did not meet Ubisoft’s internal expectations.
“To be honest, we had a rough year with Ubisoft,” Radi said. “Every month is a new problem. But with these nominations, we want to show what kind of game we can achieve when we work together and with heart.”
