I try not to talk too much about games that I haven’t played yet (which is why I haven’t, for example, talked about Everquest 2 much – haven’t had time to try it). But I’ll make an exception for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, solely because I loved the prequel so much. Once I get my copy in the mail, I’ll offer my own thoughts.

What do you do if you have a wildly fun game that constantly gets good reviews, but doesn’t fly off the shelves? Marketing’s answer: go darker. And sexier. I loved the first one, but huge parts of the reason I loved it – the storybook feel and the cocky yet idealistic prince – looked to be swept under the rug. Penny Arcade pretty much confirms my fears, as if the Godsmack soundtrack in the TV commercials did not.

Call me crazy, but I still think that the reason Prince of Persia struggled last year was that they tried to build a brand name in an already crowded Christmas season. Also, in the midst of their complaints, Gabe and Tycho stumble upon one of the fundamental difficulties of Sequel and Expansion Pack design.

I guess people complained about the combat in the first game not being deep enough. They even said the final boss was too easy. These people didn’t understand the game. Your enemy in the first game was the environment. You were battling against puzzles not monsters. The actual combat was there as a breather to give you a rest between puzzles. The final boss wasn’t even the vizier it was navigating the last level without your sword. The level was the boss, not the guy at the end. So now they’ve beefed up the combat and they make you fight all the time. So they listened to the people who didn’t like their game and totally fucked those of us who loved it. Thanks Ubi, you know a lot of people really hate all the sneaking around in Splinter Cell. Why don’t you give Sam a dual Uzis and a rocket launcher?

That’s an interesting thought on just change in general, and something that we have to deal with in online games all the time. How much do you risk your existing customers in order to try to garner new ones? I think fans of almost any game can think of times when the Vision ™ was betrayed in a crass attempt to get more bodies through the turnstiles.

Anyway, there are two obvious questions that spring up from this. The first is: what happens to PoP if this experiment doesn’t work? Do they scale back? Go darker? The second is: what if it DOES work? Is Mario with a mohawk far behind?