Brain Assassin

The Ubi­days 08 are over and Ubisoft has clar­i­fied a few things about the next install­ment in its very suc­cess­ful Prince of Per­sia fran­chise. First of all, the new Prince of Per­sia will fea­ture a prince, not the prince we all came to know dur­ing the Sands of Time tril­ogy. That means, of course, that the new prince will be totally sep­a­rate from the SoT tril­ogy. In addi­tion, he gets a new look and a new female com­pan­ion, Elika. Well, let’s start at the beginning.

The game is set in an ancient fan­tasy Per­sia, where our hero will get caught up in the bat­tle between the God of Light, Ormazd, ver­sus his twin brother Ahri­man, the God of Dark­ness. Obvi­ously, the Prince arrives just in time to wit­ness the destruc­tion of the leg­endary Tree of Life. This act threat­ens to plunge the entire world into eter­nal dark­ness and so our hero will find him­self in a world of light and dark where he has to fight to stop the rise of Ahri­man. Thus, he will sort of become Ormazd’s champion.

The game will com­bine fea­tures from the pre­vi­ous Prince of Per­sia series – like acro­batic com­bat and move­ment – and a few things that worked well in Assassin’s Creed. Accord­ing to Ben Mattes, pro­ducer, the game “will still clearly be Prince of Per­sia”. Addi­tion­ally, the prince will get a new style, a bunch of new moves, and a new gad­get – the gauntlet.

Next, there’s the new female lead named Elika. Elika will be used to explore the idea of a col­lab­o­ra­tive AI and she will be of tremen­dous help to the prince. When the player presses a des­ig­nated but­ton she will work together with the prince to over­come ene­mies and obsta­cles. Elika will be quite unable to die or get lost and she will greatly increase the over­all immer­sion. As a pow­er­ful com­pan­ion, she will be of help dur­ing explo­ration, com­bat, and puzzle-​​solving, thus enabling spe­cial moves. Obvi­ously, she also has some mag­i­cal pow­ers which can be employed at the player’s request.

As for the prince, he will be por­trayed as a wan­derer who only cares for the present. He puts func­tion before form and he has a huge reper­toire of amaz­ing moves. His range of acro­batic skills is wider than ever and the gaunt­let will cre­ate count­less oppor­tu­ni­ties for impres­sive moves. The devel­op­ers also have revamped the fight­ing sys­tem: there will be fewer fights but they will be very intense. The ene­mies will be more cun­ning than ever which will force the player to think fast and react quickly to over­come them.

Since there will be no Sand, the devel­op­ers have cho­sen another medium of chaos. This time around it takes the form of a dark, liq­uid sub­stance which phys­i­cally con­t­a­m­i­nates the land and the skies. For what­ever rea­son it is sim­ply called “the Cor­rup­tion”. Ormazd wouldn’t let that hap­pen and so he destroyed most of Ahriman’s crea­tures. When at last only a few of Ahriman’s pup­pets remained, he some­how impris­oned them in the Tree of Life. Through a link between Ahri­man and his cap­tured ser­vants Ormazd was able to pull Ahri­man him­self into the tree, lock­ing him away for good. The care of the Tree of Life was given to Ormazd’s cho­sen few, the Ahuras. By the way, Elika is one of the Ahuras …

The new game will be released in the Hol­i­day sea­son 2008 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Hav­ing played the pre­vi­ous episodes isn’t nec­es­sary to under­stand the sto­ry­line of the newest adven­ture. As of now, no offi­cial name has been released.

To get an impres­sion of the new art direc­tion, take a look at the fol­low­ing video. A high qual­ity ver­sion can be watched here.

[YouTube]sba1IkKcaF8[/YouTube]