Cancelled Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake claimed to have been 'close to the finish line'

2 hours ago 3

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft's remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was one of six projects recently cancelled as part of a "major reset" of the company's internal structure. One day after the announcement, which included a promise that more "player-facing generative AI" was on the cards, Ubisoft shares dropped to their lowest value in more than 14 years.

Rubbing some salt in the wound, Reddit posts claiming to come from a developer who worked on the project say that "it was close to the finish line." The redditor, posting under the name SocramVelmar, wrote "Although the game was close to release, development stopped suddenly due to internal uncertainty and concerns around layoffs. With things unclear, some of the team moved on to other studios that offered more stability."

If it was close to completion, you may be wondering, why not put in a little more effort to get it out the door? As SocramVelmar explained, "Because 'close' doesn't always mean 'ready.' At that point the question isn't how much time or money was already spent, it's how much more it would take to ship something the publisher is willing to stand behind. Sometimes leadership decides stopping the bleeding is cheaper than releasing something they're not confident in, even if it hurts and feels wasteful from the outside."

Basically, a failure's going to be worse for Ubisoft than cutting its losses even late in the production. Not just financially, but reputationally—and nowadays there's an expectation of post-launch support that means even a "finished" game isn't really finished, resulting in an even greater investment of resources.

SocramVelmar also says games like The Sands of Time struggled to find a place in Ubisoft's current direction. "There's been a big push toward large, open-world experiences for a while," they wrote, "and that makes it harder for tighter, linear games to find oxygen, even when they’re well loved. Sands of Time was always about pacing and flow, and that doesn't always line up with where priorities seem to be."

While the remake sounds like it would have preserved a decent amount of the 2003 game, there would also have been changes. "One mechanic we really liked was treating time less like a rewind button and more like something that leaves a trace. Instead of just undoing mistakes, you could briefly interact with echoes of your past actions. For example, you'd trigger a short time window where a past version of you finishes a jump, holds a lever, or distracts an enemy while you move forward."

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.