Misconceptions and celebration

Ugh! I thought the holidays were supposed to be about relaxing, kicking back with family, and various illumination-based symbols. Nobody ever said anything about hard work. ;-) Well, the worst is behind us – all of our months of effort are paying off, and Warrior Within is on store shelves. Sweet!

Seriously though, the game is looking great, and if I could only find a few minutes I’d be able to actually play to the first save point. The funny thing about that is, you’re probably asking yourself why somebody who works in the game industry isn’t even playing his own game. Answer: because we work so hard we don’t have time.

This also ties into a common misconception about the business I frequently encounter when I tell someone I work here. Their immediate reaction is usually something along the lines of “oh, so you program games?”. It’s a mystery to me why so many people think that working in the game business means you either write code, or do graphic design. I don’t get it.

Anyway, if you’ve gotten a chance to play the game, post your comments here. Or on the Prince of Persia Forums.

By the way, Penny Arcade did a funny comic about the game a few days ago. Those boys are so witty.

- djnogg, Prince of Persia U.S. Community Manager

Front page or bust!

Considering the months of planning involved in launching a title, it’s hard to believe that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within has hit the store shelves! There’s been a countdown up in our office for the past few months, so we’re just as excited about the game’s launch as you are.

My name is Kim and I work in public relations. To be more specific, my coworker Carol Quito and I are responsible for managing the media relations for Prince of Persia. Media coverage helps us generate “buzz,” or awareness for the game. We’re currently No. 17 on the Yahoo! Buzz Index as a “Mover” which means that there has been spike in the number of users searching for our game in the past day. We love that. We want the No.1 slot in the "Leader" column.

We work with both specialist and consumer media that cover video games. A not so little known fact – half of all Americans age six and older play videogames, so there are LOTS of different media outlets, from IGN to E! Online that we’ve worked with leading up to the launch of Warrior Within.

When you read a first look, preview, review, a Q&A, check out new screens or the latest trailer, either Carol or myself has distributed the assets and worked with outlets to secure coverage. Front page or bust. :-)

Now that the game is out, we’re seeing a lot of the game’s product reviews break. It’s done really well so far. PSM Magazine gave this year’s game an awesome score—a 10 out of 10! Official Xbox Magazine gave it a review score of 9.6 out of 10, Gamespot gave the game an 8.8 , and Yahoo! Games Domain
and 1up.com have both scored Prince 9 out of 10. If you haven’t seen them already, check them out.

In the meantime, we hope that you’re digging your new copy of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!

Kim & Carol

Only one week before launch!!!

Being the new guy on the POP team, my involvement with the project is somewhat limited. But man, am I impressed with everything I’ve seen these two months! The talent and enthusiasm from everyone is amazing. The previews and reviews so far have been encouraging. And the level of coordination required to put all the marketing elements together is simply mind-boggling. We spent many hours working on and debating about the packaging, TV ad, online banners, trailers, website, etc. Sometimes we lose perspective of how cool it is to be a part of something so much bigger than our individual selves. But back in the days when I was playing the original POP on PC, I would never have imagined that I’d be part of the team one day. :-)

Well, everything is coming together now… Got my own advanced copy of Warrior Within yesterday – so happy to see all the tweaks and turns, sweat and tears have finally come together in this one box. And I showed my girlfriend our final theatrical trailer the other day. She said, “Wow! That’s like a trailer you’d see in a movie theater.” Right on!

Looking forward to the less busy month of December now – when I finally will have some time to play all these games that are coming out this holiday season…

-- Andrew H., Brand Manager, aka the new guy

Never forget the community!

Continuing with our "behind the scenes" look at Warrior Within...

On this blog, you've read what a producer, a brand manager and a PR manager can say. Now it’s time for a community manager to get in the fray.

At Ubisoft, we believe the success of a game depends on its fan base, because they - you actually - make a game popular or not. That's why we strive to provide you with the best information, materials, and answers to your daily questions. Well ok, sometimes you don't see much motion from our side, but that doesn't mean we aren't doing anything!

For instance, let's talk about the most important debate that took place in the forums (official or not) since the demo release. Despite the fact the demo was well received by gamers, bugs aside(the demo was based on the E3 version that was created in early May!), we found out something wasn't clear enough for many of you: the new positioning of the Prince of Persia licence. Since the announcement of Prince of Persia Warrior Within, we focused our efforts on the newest aspect of the game: its fighting system. If you remember well, it was the biggest concern for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. So we decided to show you what has been improved in this sequel. But then, POP fans started thinking POP Warrior Within was nothing more than a basic beat'em up, while it still has heavy elements of the gameplay you loved from the last game, such as platforming and puzzles.

There was a breach in our way of communicating! This means it was a special mission for the team: understanding what was wrong and finding a solution to let everyone know POP Warrior Within is the best action-adventure game anyone have ever played! What happened then? Well we just gave away what the fans wanted: platform-oriented screenshots, persian-style music (check out the music player on the European official website!) and an upcoming trailer showing how the game is balanced between all of its gameplay elements. As Yannis Mallat (executive producer) said in the live chat we did lately: "POP:SOT was 50% fight and 50% puzzle/exploration. Now POPWW is 100% of both."

Now that you know the game IS what you have always expected it to be, the only question that must remain unanswered is "how long am I able to wait before Prince of Persia Warrior Within hits the stores?!"
-- Bruno Guerin, Lead Community Manager

Prince of Persia Warrior Within – A Canadian perspective on the new Prince’s adventure!

Being by the folks at Ubisoft’s Montreal Studio, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within has generated a lot of attention from the Canadian press. It all started at E3 back in May. Since then, one after the other the Canadian journalists have been interested in covering the Prince in one way or the other.

First, Space Channel came in to meet the team and shoot some footage that resulted in an 8-minute segment that aired on October 8 and 9 this fall. Then, Electric Playground came and produced a segment that starred POP’s Executive Producer Yannis Mallat, his nephew and my son.

Another big event for POP: Warrior Within was Microsoft’s X04 – a media event promoting Xbox titles to released before Christmas. POP:WW had a strong showing at this event, getting national coverage from every newspaper, reaching millions of Canadians.

Since then, the Prince and the team have been everywhere: Total Gamer, Hub, Musique Plus, Xboxaddict.com; Slam!, Much Music, MTV Canada and even making the cover of Montreal’s most serious business journal this week!!!

Last Tuesday, Nintendo of Canada invited us to there annual media event to showcase POP:WW. Me and JC Guyot, Creative Director of PoP:WW, were on site to give interviews, meet people and provide info on the game to the hundreds attending. JC is the guy! He’s a charm to work with and I think his work will be applauded by millions of fans in the next few weeks as people discover the new Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.

That’s it for me, for now.

- Cedric Orvoine – Ubisoft Montreal PR

No more travel

It is the final month until PoP:WW ships and things in the world of PR have not slowed down one bit as I had hoped – wishful thinking on my part. To say the least, I am happy that I do not have to travel to our Montreal studio anymore. I visited Montreal seven times over the course of four months! At least one good came out of that – the frequent-flyer miles I gained. The bad is that I seemingly picked up the habit of saying, “eh” a lot. My friends find this quite frightful. =)

But I do miss seeing the development team. There is something fun and exciting about being in the studio, witnessing first-hand the creation of the game. I know when I brought media with me to the studio, they too, were blown away by the passion and dedication the team conveyed when they spoke about their work on PoP:WW.

Being in the last stretch of development, the team is in major crunch mode right now, arduously working to make the game shine. I hope all the good PR coverage the game is receiving validates to the team that they are not working overtime in vain and that all their hard work is paying off. The buzz around PoP:WW is amazing. We have received fantastic previews and reviews from the video game press! Most notable examples are from Official Xbox Magazine, which gave it a review score of 9.6 out of 10, and PSM, who gave it a perfect 10! Expect more great scores from the other video game magazines.

The online coverage has been exceptional as well. Recently GameSpot posted their preview and IGN gave PoP some love with their exclusive story on the Xbox Live features. Be on the lookout for more great coverage as we begin to unleash more information about the game, conveyed through feature stories, new screenshots and cool trailers. The best is yet to come, I promise!


-- Carol Q., PR

Better late than never

Here we are, on Friday night in Montreal. First, I didn’t neglected by blogging duty djnogg!! ;-) I’m here -- busy -- but I’m here!! Okay, so this is last minute, but not late… It’s 8pm and 60% of the whole team is here (which still makes a good 40 people, now that the animators and pre-rendered scenes guys left), eating some delivery food (those guys are making a hell of a lot of money out of us BTW!), getting some strength before spending another loooong night. I’m currently checking the latest reports on the build. There are of course some little bugs found by the testers that we fix on the fly, but here tonight, the designers are playing the game on the “hard” difficulty level. To be honest, even us have some hard time to pass the 3rd boss fight in this mode!!! So we may actually adjust it a little. Some final tweaking always occurs, but it’s for the good of the game. It’s funny because they don’t even know they’ll still be here tomorrow morning at this pace. A complete walkthrough takes a good 18 to 20 hours in normal difficulty mode, so…I guess we’ll be ordering breakfast soon !!

This is pretty much what happens at the end of projects: you can’t stop to play your game because it doesn’t stop getting better and better, day after day… Four guys lay on the couch with one playing on the huge TV screen with Dolby Prologic II and Progressive Scan activated, chips and food on the ground… Cool stuff indeed. It reminds me of last year at the exact same date: we were playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with the same scene: playing the game, passing the controller around to the next person… Although this time the game is much longer and much… better.

Tomorrow, we’ll get the latest trailer so that we can approve it before releasing it on the web for you guys… I can’t wait, I’ve been very pleased with the quality of the first one.

Know what: I think I’ll borrow the couch and pillow to take a little nap… The pizza is heavy on my stomach…

See you guys !!

Y«

(Yannis Mallat -- Executive Producer)

Wanna know what it's really like?

I'll tell you what's it's like working in the game business -- herding cats! If you're not familiar with that expression, just imagine what such a thing would entail. Seriously though, what I mean by that is that I've actually had a hard time getting people to put their thoughts down on...um...screen for this blog. Certain people, who shall remain nameless, neglected their blogging responsibilities for the week. So here I am, at 4:55 PM on Friday, telling you all about it. It's all good though -- I'm just giving folks a hard time.

So what's new in Prince of Persia land? Well, we're getting closer to launch. A bunch of folks were gathered around a TV near my desk watching the cinematics from Warrior Within today. Being the distractable type, and seeing fleeting images of the Prince, I got up to check it out. As it turned out, they had a tape with *all* of the cinematics from the game in a loop. SPOILERS! Maybe I'm too much of a purist, but I couldn't bear to watch -- I really want to play the game and still have some surprises. Is that lame?

Anyway, I'm almost out for the week. Have a great weekend, and for you U.S. folks, Happy Halloween!

- djnogg, PoP Community Manager