On the surface, the new Prince of Persia is a straightforward and inoffensive experience, but Ubisoft Montreal has gotten me thinking through their myriad of design choices toward minimizing frustration above all else, because for the most part they succeed. Between the subtle auto-correction of angles that were just a bit off or distances that were just a bit too short and Elika's "integrated quick-load," I never felt like the game was trying to get in the way. I recognize that this is an utterly challenge-neutralizing move, but it did what it attempted to do, as I had no problem cruising through and seeing everything the game had to offer. Were the game offering something a little more interesting, this would have been an extremely welcome addition. It wasn't, so the design choices only served to streamline and hurry you through an pleasant but ultimately vapid experience. Prince's design choices did at least get my mind percolating, and after finishing it, I found myself going back to, of all things, Mirror's Edge.
Mirror's Edge in many ways is the yang to Prince's yin. It is certainly one frustrating, complex and painful game with enough intrigue and exhilaration to warrant interest despite its flaws. I love the shiny, barren, Kowloon-esque cityscape, the dystopian atmosphere, as well as the feeling of hurling from building to building never looking back, or looking down. Even the story intrigues me and wants me to keep going, so it's a real shame that the designers saddled so much good stuff with an absurd and awkward control scheme, a platforming mechanic that demands precision, and a perspective that puts said precision at a steep premium.
I'm not about to jump on the "Mirror's Edge needs to be third person" bandwagon, as the sheer adrenaline that the perspective offers justifies that design choice. If we assume that its exhilaration is its main draw and the key to its value proposition, then the perspective necessitates a workaround as we know through years of racing games that pulling the perspective out to third person does alter the perception of speed. Mirror's Edge needed significant tweaks and improvements to improve its accessibility, and Prince really holds the key. If Mirror's Edge had Prince's straightforward control scheme and simple retry points, the entire game experience would be improved as I wouldn't spend nearly as much time or effort replaying the same stuff again and again because I misjudged one jump or got turned around by the control scheme.
Above all else, though, the unforgiving implementation of the mechanics is what really kept me from getting into the game. I knew the jump I needed to make, the game knew which jump I was trying to make, but I missed since I was a few inches too far to the right. I plummeted to my death because in trying to build up speed I didn't bother to look down and see that there wasn't actually a rooftop where I was jumping until I was already in the air. Identifying the problem is simple: I can't really get a clear perception of the game environment. Identifying the solution is a little tougher because Mirror's Edge's biggest problems are ones inherent to the genre.
First person platforming is a tricky beast because visual perception is a tricky beast. If you'll allow me a bit of dry science babble, the reason so many first person shooters often rely upon unrealistic tricks like mini-map in order to reasonably approximate the in-game functions of the transsaccadic integration (a sort of perceptive map) that our eyes form naturally through rapid motions around the periphery of our field of vision. A realistic implementation of this map would be exceptionally hard to reproduce with simply a tunnel-vision view into our flatscreens and a single stick or mouse to orient our vision.
How we view the world in first person games is not close to how we really see, and complex, unforgiving platform games that hinge on a detailed knowledge of the environment rely on exactly the perceptive functions that we have no way of recreating. This inherent problem means that mistakes are going to happen by design, and the addition of something similar to Prince of Persia's auto-correction and forgiveness would be just what the doctor ordered. Allowing those "guess I wasn't far enough" jumps to connect and fudging the angles a little if I don't jump straight on would address most of my significant complaints with the game. When put with all the interface enhancements that DICE already implemented such as giving game play objects a red glow and automatically pointing you in the right direction with a button press, the game starts to look pretty solid mechanically.
I doubt that Prince would have been made any better by adding in all of the retrying, complexity, and general frustration of Mirror's Edge so obviously this isn't a perfectly two-way street or the recipe for fixing what ails the Prince. It certainly could have handled some more challenge, but I don't think that adding a mass amount of retreading and frustration is necessarily the answer, especially for a game that had none of the interest and intrigue of Mirror's Edge to keep the player going. In fact, in an era where more game developers are trying to branch out and expand the ways they can tell stories, frustration and challenge serve as barriers to entry.
We all want wider acceptance of games, of course, and storytelling can be a means to that end, but as long as the end of the story is viewed as a reward only for the most devoted and skilled gamers, all that effort will be in vain. With the discovery of Nintendo's "Kind Code" patent application, there's a lot more discussion to be had on this topic, so there will definitely be followups coming. Do you find yourself out of your element when games don't penalize you or frustrate you? At what point do they cease being games at all? Does it matter?
