Prince of Persia DLC

Note: There are some major Prince of Persia spoilers in this article.

I’ve always been a little hesitant to jump aboard the console downloadable content bandwagon. It seems with each passing year games are getting shorter and DLC is coming out sooner. I can understand why developers are doing it, besides just making money, stats have shown that 30 days after a games release is the sweet spot to reinvigorate player interest. This means not only can they sell 10 dollars worth of stuff to a large chunk of their install base, but also that all these people are less likely to sell their game back to GameStop and potentially snatch a sale away from the creators.

Having said that I am still very excited about the new Prince of Persia Epilogue DLC that was announced last week. Despite liking PoP, including its controversial ending, it drives me crazy when a game or movie is written with a major plot cliffhanger at the end. It is one thing to resolve a primary story and set the mood for what is yet to come. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within did this well by wrapping up the storyline and then showing the Prince’s hometown ravaged by war. This way you knew there was more to come, but the story was already wrapped up. The new Prince of Persia most definitely did not end this way and I was fairly angry thinking I’d have to wait another two years to see what the hell happens.

I’m excited because this DLC sounds like it is going to help flesh out the ending of PoP a mere 3 months after the games release. Of course you could argue they already had the story all planned out and just held onto the content to cash in on it later, but this seems to say otherwise. Who knows how truthful Ben Mattes was being, but I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt.

One problem this epilogue will bring is it undermines the theory that the game gave us a choice to stop playing once the first set of credits rolled. I personally never thought that was the real end, in large part due to the beating the game achievement only being unlocked after the second set of credits start. Still, even if the developers didn’t intend for you to turn the game off and let it end with Elika lying dead on the altar it still is a perfectly reasonable decision to come too given the context of the ending. The credits do roll before you bring Elika back and you are in control of the Prince and can choose to stop playing.

Now that there is another chapter to the story that theory really can’t hold up anymore. Now it would be like stopping in the middle of a game rather than at a sort of ambiguous end. Depending on how this story plays out, it is very unlikely that anyone will be able to maintain the above argument. However, this most likely would have happened anyway when the inevitable sequel comes out a couple years from now.

This is kind of sad because I found the debate about turning off the game to be incredibly interesting. Who knows though, maybe the story in the epilogue will lead to an even more interesting ending. At the very least I am very curious to hear what Elika has to say now that she has time to say more than “Why?”