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[olimario]

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=56223

Eurogamer: How big do you think the game will be in comparison to the original?

Yannis Mallot: In terms of original gameplay, meaning the first time the player takes that challenge, we expect the game to be as long as The Sands Of Time. That doesn't take into consideration all the revisits the Prince have going back and forth in time. For example, because we create new level design challenge and new gameplay, we can definitely add a good three to four hours [compared] to the original Sands Of Time gameplay.

Eurogamer: Technically, are you doing anything new? Is it the same game engine before? Have you improved it much?

Yannis Mallot: That's the same Jade engine. We had a meeting with the Sony people themselves and they said, "You know what? The PS2 capabilities are here and your game is here" [motions hands to the same level], so we thought there's no way we can improve that. But the first thing we did on the PoP2 project was to put a five or six man engineer team together to try and look at the engine and see if, indeed, it could not be improved. And as a matter of fact, those guys came back and optimised the engine by 25 per cent. So this is 25 per cent more space for rooms, more texture, bigger maps, new special effect, and this is really really impressive when you see the size of the maps and all the new stuff.

Eurogamer: Are you making much more use of the Xbox than before?

Yannis Mallot: Yes, of course... The Xbox is much more impressive in terms of visuals, with things like heat effect and normal mapping and proper dynamic lighting.

 

[belgurdo]

In before "Bad ART!1!" and "Y Si iT Soooo GOTH"

 

[olimario]

I skimmed over this, but this rocks.

Eurogamer: Will there be any new modes in the other versions?

Yannis Mallot: GameCube will feature a specific rendering system optimization, water effect, heat effect, physics effect, which match pretty much what you can do on Xbox.

 

[jett]

Eh, weird. The PS2 version of PoP had "heat" effects.

 

[StrikerObi]

Eurogamer: Tell us about these 'Interactive Cinematics'.

Yannis Mallot: Interactive cinematics are basically showing an event that occurs, or dialogue, but still leaving the control to the player. This means you have playable moments even when there's a dialogue - it's totally immersive. We don't want the player not to play - we do want them to find out about the story in full, but we want him to play.

Well, I'm glad they are keeping this from Prince of Persia SoT. As far as I'm concerned it's a paradigm shift in videogame storytelling.

Too bad the story will suck.

 

[Ranger X]

bleh, Prince of Persia the Sands of Time needed more cut-scenes (read story telling).
As a matter of fact, maybe you would have like the story better!!

 

[epmode]

how could they do that entire interview and not once ask if the platforming sections are being scaled back?

 

[jett]

Well, I'm glad they are keeping this from Prince of Persia SoT. As far as I'm concerned it's a paradigm shift in videogame storytelling.

Too bad the story will suck.

Heh, why is the story going to suck? Do you even know it? It sounds cool to me.

 

[Azih]

Prince of Persia Sands of time got it's story across perfectly and managed to create a nice amount of depth for the two main characters (Hah the prince's whining after the princess leaves to head down to the baths is just really really classic). I'm glad they're not messing with that.


Edit: I think the quality of the story in the next game depends on how compelling the Prince's crisis is and if there's a good villian.

 

[Lord Error]

Well, I'm glad they are keeping this from Prince of Persia SoT. As far as I'm concerned it's a paradigm shift in videogame storytelling.

Well, that was done for the first time looong time ago with 'Another World' and more recently with 'Half Life' and 'ICO'. Still, not too many games use that kind of storytelling, (which is a shame).

Eh, weird. The PS2 version of PoP had "heat" effects.

I doubt this guy know too much detail about the technical back end of his game. He's probably just repeating fragments of what his programmers were telling him. For example, he talks about normal mapping in the Xbox version, but I haven't seen any in the videos so far. He might be just talking about hardware capabilities in general, that he's heard about, not really knowing if his game is actually using them.

 

[StrikerObi]

Heh, why is the story going to suck? Do you even know it? It sounds cool to me.

1) First and foremost, it's not being written by Jordan Mechner (who created the original Prince of Persia games and was a gameplay consultant and wrote the story for Prince of Persia: Sands of Time). He's not involved in the project basically at all. This is a HUGE reason of why the sequel won't be as good.

2) From what they've said about the story it's "darker and more mature" which is a horrible fucking cliche in the videogame world. Sands of Time was original, PoP2 is going to be derivitive.

 

[Diomedeskun]

It really sounds like a pretty cool game, from the interview. I will dearly miss the 1001 Nights style that the first one had, but it will probably be a very good game. Sands of Time already had a much darker style than the original Prince of Persia, and they want to make it a different game, I just hope some Arabic fantasy still remains.