Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is first Ubisoft game with High Contrast Mode
"Accessible design is good design."
Ubisoft's upcoming 2.5D Metroidvania game Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has been developed to be "accessible by design", with a host of features that aim to make it an approachable release for all.
In a new video from the developer focused specifically on accessibility, the team shared how they have approached this release, with senior gameplay programmer Christophe De Labrouhe stating "Metroidvania games can be quite hard, and this one can be quite hard too".
But while The Lost Crown can be challenging, the team doesn't want this to put players off, and so has included a variety of accessibility options as standard. This includes larger text by default, no quick time events and "no colour-based feedback". In addition, there will be options that will allow players to customise the gameplay difficulty to a style that's best for them.
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"I think that accessible design is good design," senior game designer Rémi Boutin said. "We want to provide a challenging game, but we really want to make sure that everyone can tweak the experience to their fitting."
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown will also have a High Contrast Mode, which Boutin said is "the first for an Ubisoft game".
"We had a lot of data to tag - enemies, allies, the player, all the rewards, traps. It was a lot of data to process to be sure that people with low vision can play and understand what is happening on the screen," he said.
There will also be a Guided Mode players can activate to help them keep track of where they are meant to be going, which can be switched on temporarily. Additionally, players will be able to place a Memory Shard, which will allow them to pin screenshots to the map to help with exploration.
You can check out Ubisoft's full Accessibility Deep Dive video below.
Our Ian has been hands-on with three hours of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. He reckons the game's movement and combat are fun and fluid, while its exploration and puzzles will entice you to keep on playing until you've uncovered the whole map. But - as yet - it doesn't yet rival the best of the Metroidvania genre, or the best of the Prince of Persia brand either. You can listen to his thoughts so far in the first video embed above.
In the meantime, if you are keen to give the game a go for yourself, Ubisoft is releasing a free demo for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown next week, on 11th January across all release platforms: Xbox consoles, PlayStation consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Epic, Ubisoft).