That discussion of wall gems led into another major difference in the new Prince of Persia: a much more open, free-roaming world. Unlike earlier entries in the series that were much more linear, the new Prince of Persia will allow players to roam essentially at will in the ruined garden, tackling various areas as they see fit. In this particular area, we watched the Prince and Elika struggle to jump and run across ruined walls and swing around flagpoles to reach a particular area where she could use her powers to heal that section of the garden. Opposing her were roiling areas of corruption on the walls (which looked like stationary oil slicks) that were instant death to touch, and also one of Ahriman's minions, called the Hunter.
About halfway through the level, the Hunter cornered the pair and the game moved into a boss fight. What was interesting about the boss fight was that it wasn't made difficult by the more common sorts of "boss fight" gimmicks that turn these affairs into a timed series of button presses. Instead the boss fight was a much more strategic and quite unscripted affair in which the Prince and Elika had to work together to defeat the Hunter. Indeed, just how unscripted the fight was become apparent just a few exchanges in when the demonstrator kicked the hunter off a ledge and ended it. While surprised, the Ubisoft demonstrator kept the demo going, saying that this is the kind of thing that would happen in the actual game.
The Hunter's loss in that battle, however, didn't mean he was finished. Instead he upped the ante by releasing a new form of corruption -- dark rolling blobs -- that proceeded to blast around the walls, clogging up routes that had once been clear. This, then, is one of the things that will curtail the player's freedom of movement through the game. The new corruptions the Hunter had released didn't only infest the room; they would now be found throughout the garden. Each of Ahriman's minions will do something similar, releasing new obstacles that guarantee that how a player experiences a particular room is dictated by the bosses they've already fought. That means that not only will certain areas be unreachable before Elika acquires certain powers, the difficulty of the game will change depending on how the player decides to proceed.
In fact, the exploration aspect of the game isn't over even when a particular area is healed. Healing a zone removes the obstacles caused by corruption, but opens a new collecting game with glowing "Seeds of Life" floating all over the place that take almost as much running, jumping and puzzle-solving as clearing the area in the first place. Even better, the developers claim they've left in "perfect lines," or incredibly long routes that the Prince and Elika will be able to navigate without ever touching the floor. It's easy to imagine Xbox 360 achievements (or just bragging rights on other systems) being built around discovering these perfect lines and collecting all the Seeds.
If's there's a particular fly in this Prince's hummus, it'd be the development team's decision for the "sands of time" replacement. In the previous series, the Prince acquired the power to rewind about 10 seconds of time and re-do them if he made some sort of fatal mistake. In the new game, the Prince simply can't die. Instead of dying after a mistake, Elika merely swoops down and rescues the Prince and sets him back to a predetermined checkpoint. The team claims that this makes the game friendlier for new players and is the rough equivalent of the old save-and-restore. Others will no doubt see it as the loss of an intriguing strategic element in which the player must search for and carefully husband the sand. Whether this reduces some of the game's challenge will be seen when the game releases this November.
