At the recently concluded Taipei Game Show 2024, I had the privilege of conducting an exclusive interview with Abdelhak Elguess, the producer of one of this year’s earliest-released and highly acclaimed games, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The interview covered various aspects, including decisions made during the game’s development, sources of inspiration of the game, as well as the design philosophy of the development team for the game.
Q: All the action designs in “The Lost Crown” are incredibly diverse and very smooth, including all the combat and parkour-like moves. I’m wondering if the success of the game’s action design is attributed to the series transitioning into a 2.5D Castlevania-type style? Or did this transition actually made it more difficult in terms of action designs?
Abdelhak Elguess: In fact, we don’t know if we make it easier; it shows that for us, the fluidity of all the combat moves was very important. One thing is for sure is that when we decided to go for a 2.5D Castlevania-type action game, the camera was one of the challenges for us. How to make the camera really helpful to platforming and combat in the game, to make everything fluid between them so that you can easily go from platform action to combat action, or mix action in combat. Since the game runs at 60 frames per second on the Nintendo Switch and 120 frames per second on the PS5, everything moves so quickly and at the same time very smoothly,so in order to make the camera work for us to adapt the 2.5D platforming action game and deliver that kind of fluidity experience, it is really a big technical challenge for us because it is really important for us.
Q: Having already finished the game myself, I think that the game is very successful in terms of combining both Metroidvania genre style map exploring and Prince of Persia-style puzzle solving action-platformer gameplay. What were some of the team’s biggest genre inspirations in the design of “The Lost Crown” regarding the combination of these two different genres?
Abdelhak Elguess: There are quite a few different kinds of inspirations for us for this game, obviously like the original Castlevania games, the recent one like Hollow Knight, and some games from the Metroidvania genre as well. There were also some fighting games that inspired us to make such fluid combat in the game, like Street Fighters, trying to put in some strategic and complex combo moves for players to create unique physical movement in the game themselves. Yeah, many games from these two genres are the inspirations for us to make this game, but of course, the inspirations from previous Prince of Persia games are to bring back some time element puzzles and some acrobatic combats. Also, beyond video games, we also get some inspiration regarding the animation of the game from different movies and anime, like various Japanese action anime, from the Spider-Man movie into the Spider-verse, etc.
Q: The time travel mechanics in the Prince of Persia series were always fun to play. This time in “The Lost Crown” too! Especially all the time puzzle rooms located in the Temple of Knowledge area. How did you approach designing encounters with such a potentially complex ability in mind?
Abdelhak Elguess: Yeah, the first one that came to mind was the time-rewind power of the game. You might already know that the rewind power existed in the previous Prince of Persia games as well, and this power was a great feature at that time and was a good technical breakthrough in video games. But this time this rewind power for us is afraid to use in The Lost Crown again because it would not let us create flexibility control for the player because when you use the action with rewind power in past games, you would lose control for a few seconds when the game is rewinding and regain control once the rewind power is finished, and that is not something we want this time. What we want this time is for the player to always be in control of the game, even with the rewind power. So that approach led to the possibility of combining various abilities and movements with all the time-travel mechanic abilities in the game this time. So this is really a kind of game design philosophy that we used to approach in this game, everything you have, like all the moves you can perform and combine them with all the abilities at any moment in the game, whether in moments of combat or puzzle-solving, players always have the control of various actions for the character, and this was also the game design philosophy we approached this time where we could not in the past for the Prince of Persia games.
Q: While I know Ubisoft is an expert in historical references during the development of games, and I understand that due to the Prince of Persia series, Ubisoft no doubt has a certain understanding of Persian history, I’m curious if it would be any different or let’s say, more challenging to reference Persian history for “The Lost Crown” this time?
Abdelhak Elguess: The thing is that we really want to do a good fantasy for our game, but at the same time, it was important for us to respect the culture and history of the mythology background we used in the game. This time, the mythology background we used in the game is different from any we used before. We do some interpretation and some mixing in this mythology, with some game elements like the time power elements and stuff like this. I think this way that many people will learn a lot about this mythology, or maybe this way the game will inspire a lot of people to look after it on any media website about Persian history or the mythology we used this time. So no, it was not difficult for us because this process was really exciting for us, and we enjoy making games with historical references.
Q: When I play “The Lost Crown”, personally I chose to play the game in Persian Farsi language because I felt it would add a Persian touch to the experience, although still using English words in the game. I have been wondering, during the production of the Prince of Persia games, were English and Persian always the priority regarding the localization of the game?
Abdelhak Elguess: Oh really? Very nice to hear that! Yeah definitely! This is something very important for us to focus on when making every Prince of Persia game. Of course, we use the English language for obvious reasons, right? On the other hand, for us, it was important to deliver Farsi language in Prince of Persia games to players for immersion purposes too. So I’m very happy to hear that you actually play the game in Farsi! That’s the reason why we believe there are players out there who enjoy using the language that matches the game background for immersion purposes and also to discover and learn more about new languages in games. Good choice you made there!
Q: As one of the earliest-released games in this year 2024 and having received such positive reviews from various media, with even the potential to become a benchmark for modern 2.5D Castlevania-type action-platformer games, does the development team have any thoughts on this achievement?
Abdelhak Elguess: As far as I know, the team is very happy and very exciting. We are all watching players on the website express their satisfying emotions about the game after the launch, so yeah, the development team is very happy. Especially, we discovered that more and more players were surprised about the content of the game, because at the beginning, I believe when players saw the trailer of the game, they would think that the game would be a small and insignificant game that added to the series, and now for those players who played the game, they were surprised to see that the game actually had many surprises and secrets. They were even surprised about the fact that the character would be so strong and possess so many powers at the end of the game that they could still be able to do many things when they finished the game. Since this situation is getting rarer in video games, this aspect of the game is really important for us in order to get such satisfying emotions from all the players after playing the game, and we feel very honoured for it.
Q: If the sales of the game perform well, can we expect to see the protagonist this time, Sargon, in the future? Perhaps in DLCs or sequels of the series?
Abdelhak Elguess: After putting in so much effort, we certainly hope to continue the legendary story of Sargon. Now, we do hope players can let us know whether they look forward to seeing more of Sargon.
Some interesting conversations during the interview:
Me: I actually played and finished the game in like more than 30 hours, and I really liked the game! I even 100% the game!
Abdelhak Elguess: So, did you play the game on normal difficulty?
Me: I think I played the game with custom difficulty. Yeah, like I will make the HP of enemies in the game higher in order to do more combos, or like I will make the character getting Athra easier in the game and stuff like that. I love this kind of thing!
Abdelhak Elguess: Oh! Yeah! Actually, we’ve seen a lot of players start to play the game with custom difficulty too.
Me: Yeah, for me, custom difficulty is really interesting, especially for The Lost Crown this kind of game. I think more games should implement this feature in the future as well!
Me: Oh yeah, I also really like the…
Abdelhak Elguess: The memory shards feature, is it? Haha!
Me: Haha, yes! This was easily one of the most exciting features of the game for me when I discovered it in the demo play!
Abdelhak Elguess: Yeah, right! We think that having this feature would benefit the game a lot, especially for players who wanted to achieve 100% of the game, like yourself!
Me: Yeah, this feature serves as a good reminder for players like myself to know why I should come back to some specific area in order to 100% the game.
Abdelhak Elguess: It’s good to hear that! Thank you very much!
Me: Thank you very much!
The above concludes our interview section with Abdelhak Elguess, the producer of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Here, we sincerely thank Ubisoft Singapore for facilitating this exclusive interview and we express deep gratitude to Mr. Abdelhak Elguess for generously sharing valuable insights into the development process of the game.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is now available on various platforms, including PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
