Aside from studying, watching Rangers defeat Celtic and being repeatedly taken down by a tiny tank driven by a fellow Ready-Up staff member in Paradise City I have recently been playing Prince of Persia for the Xbox 360. I’m an old school Prince of Persia fan, having done the impossible and successfully beaten the hourglass to save the day back on my Master System when I was just a nipper, so I came into this one on high hopes. A reboot of the series was needed after the sublime Sands of Time was run into the ground by generic sequels and the graphics look absolutely gorgeous. It plays like a mix of Sands of Time and Mirrors Edge with a bit of Assassins Creed thrown in for good measure and I was having a staggeringly good time playing it. That is until some story progression was needed.
Now, aside from my various blogs about the sporting world I have talked about story in games and where it works and doesn’t. I tend to focus on writing however direction is equally as important and the way the story is fed to you as a gamer. For me Sands of Time did plot progression perfectly, with a narration of what you were doing by you whilst you played. It was unique, didn’t get in the way of the actual gameplay whilst still getting the plot across. The likes of Dead Space and Bioshock excelled with audio files found and played over the top of the game giving hints and what was going on, an intelligent successor to the archaic Resident Evil text log style of plot progression. The other route you can take is all out cinematics, which Grant Theft Auto and Final Fantasy can be seen doing along with Metal Gear Solid. Where you put the pad down and enjoy high production animated shorts. They all have their positives and negatives and all have their place in story telling. Why is it then, amidst these examples of numerous story telling techniques does Prince of Persia have the most bafflingly pathetic method of letting you find out about the world you are in?
Cutscenes are few and far between, tend to be before and after boss fights. The majority of story progression and plot depth is found through discussions between the two leads. These are optional (thankfully) and can be activated by a click of a button. When you do that however the characters stop dead and you have to watch static characters stand and stare at eachother whilst relating parts fo the story or the background to the world. My question is simple, why make us stop? If you are going to make us stop go for the high quality cinematics angle, or even the Mass Effect/text adventure style where lengthy discussions find interest as you have control over what you say. But why make me stop dead and watch something so dull? The whole game is built around the notion of running and acrobatic displays yet if you want to get engrossed in the world you have to stop dead everytime. A basic lack of thought went into story telling for Prince of Persia, and it’s a crying shame because the rest of the game is fantastic and this basic error is stopping me from jumping head first into a world the developers clearly took time to create. It’s worrying for such a big game to regard story with such disdain, hopefully as we see this years big games unveiled at E3 we see that this was a blip and that the good work done on narrative by the likes of Bioshock is continued.
Gaming News 24/7
May 14th, 2009 at 11:11 am
I understand what you are saying, and I agree partly with that you say. I don’t mind taking a break from the action to sit back and listen to the story telling and learn about the world you’re tranversing. And being able to do it at any time was a way to give you move control as to when you want to run and when you want to listen.
What I would have liked thou, was for the discussion to go on without me having to activate the next part of the conversation. Other than that, I was fine with the story telling.
I still have to go back to complete the DLC. Now that was something that I had problems with, however, that’s for another time.
May 14th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
That’s a good point, hitting LT every new conversation point was extremely annoying as well.
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 am
If the cut scenes and storytelling in a game don’t jar too much with the rest it can be fine, but i found the animated cuts in Mirror’s edge to be a little disappointing. Haven’t yet tried POP, though I must say it doesn’t sound too enthralling from what you’ve said!