Prince of Persia has been received as an interactive work of art. Its universe is so rich and special: a photorealistic approach would have belied its Arabian Nights origins. All images © Ubisoft. 

If you're an old-school fan of the Prince of Persia games, then you remember Prince on the Super Nintendo and the Sega Master System. If you're a really old-school fan, then you remember Prince on old PCs like the Amiga and the Amstrad. Alright, that's enough reminiscing about stone-age computers. There is a new Prince of Persia out and I got to have a little chat about the new art and animation styles with the game's producer Ben Mattes.

Since its announcement, the newest Prince of Persia has been received by many on-lookers as an interactive work of art. The reason why is because the last three installments of Prince of Persia all had the same artistic style, which was very realistic and similar to the look of Assassin's Creed. This time around the artists at Ubisoft have created a 3D art style that is brand new to the Prince of Persia series, which is meant to look more hand drawn than anything else. "We wanted to remain very close to the 2D concept art, keeping the essence of their artworks in the 3D world," said Mattes. "The Prince of Persia universe is so rich and special that it would be a shame to picture it in a photorealistic way. We wanted it to be true to its Arabian Nights origins." Before the game was released, Ubisoft released comparison shots of the new PoP concept art and a final render of the Prince. To be honest, it was pretty hard to distinguish the hand drawn concept art from the 3D render!

The Prince gets help from a new female character, Elika, who helps him fight and advance through his adventure. Her introduction allowed the animators to create cooperative animations, which make the pair extremely acrobatic.

When asked about how they came up with the look and the feel of this new Prince of Persia world, Mattes replied, "The intention was to find a good balance in between the One Thousand and One Night's universe and paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme." Paintings by Jean- Léon Gérôme often tend to have a very Arabian, Middle-Eastern feel to them. To keep things looking hand-drawn, Ubisoft illustrators hand drew a series of very detailed textures, which were then mapped to the characters and environments. "We then applied different shaders to add some relief and shadow that really seizes and looks like what an illustrator would do. We then added a black outline around the characters, which makes them feel more hand drawn but, most importantly, it also makes them come out of the image, which helps for the reading of the game play," added Mattes. As for the environments, there was another distinct challenge: in this new Prince of Persia the world has been corrupted and so the environments look dark and damaged. As different areas begin to heal, they then looked completely different from their corrupted states. "Creating a style for both of those parallel worlds was a big challenge giving us twice the amount of work for every region. We knew we wanted for the corrupted world to be a desolate and forsaken land, and for the healed world to be a warm and bright land, but we had to really push our creativity to create all the textures to make the player feel the struggle of the land. Also, we didn't want to have the same style of corruption for every region giving them only one particular identity."