Prince of Persia Epilogue

I played through the PoP DLC last night. It was a fun romp; the level design is a lot more creative and at times a bit more difficult. It took me about three hours to finish and I definitely enjoyed it. The new moves were sort of moot however, they added a fifth magic plate and the Prince can now sprint towards an enemy in combat to initiate a QTE for a stun. Neither was a significant addition, but added a little something to change up the experience from December.

The main reason I was excited for this though was not the new gameplay changes. It was the cliffhanger ending that threatened to remain a mystery for another two years before PoP2 came out. Of course it was addressed by the DLC, how could it not be? The biggest gameplay mechanic, Elika, is still usable so they had to address the “disagreement” between her and the Prince.

I am a little disappointed in how they went about with this. Essentially it can be summed up as Elika is rightfully incredibly angry with the Prince and disillusioned by the prospect of stopping Ahriman again. They exchange a few conversations about it, but little progress is made by the end of the epilogue. It does end on a fairly good note that once again leaves me hopeful for future titles, but this wasn’t the satisfying conclusion I was looking for.

I’d still definitely recommend it if you liked playing through PoP, at ten bucks you get about a third of the amount of play that you got for spending sixty. That’s like half off! However if you were one of the few people that chose to turn the console off instead of finishing the canon ending you aren’t going to want check this out. You can probably figure out why. ;)

On that note, I was perusing the internets the other day and stumbled across Ben Mattes blog. He was the producer of the Prince of Persia. After skimming a few of his posts I found one explaining why his team chose to end their latest game with the controversial ending that it did rather than offering an obvious choice. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article, it comes down to if they ever made a sequel they didn’t want to have to pick which ending was canon. This is what they were forced to do when they finished off the Sands of Time trilogy. The middle game, Warrior Within had two endings, and the harder to obtain ending was the one they ended up choosing to use. This probably led to some confusion for the fans that were unaware of the alternate ending when they started up the final game, Two Thrones.

I have no problem with this explanation, Ben even states in his article that they expected 5% of people to just turn off their consoles and accept an alternate ending by not completing the entirety of the game. He also says, as I think is common knowledge, that this new storyline has always been planned as a trilogy so anyone that chose to turn off their consoles should have been aware that they were also choosing to ignore any sequels that are coming. This is a fine alternative; I just don’t think most people considered sequels when they chose to turn off their consoles. I’m guessing it slipped their mind, because looking at games these days, especially from a company like Ubisoft, it’s incredibly naïve to think otherwise.