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The Rogue Prince of Persia – Part 3-2

Our mother is now safely ensconced at the Oasis with our brother and other allies. With that taken care of, we have only one last remaining lead to follow.

Where is our father!?

Streamed at: https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

As I rewatch the footage I recorded in anticipation of writing this post, a question occurs to me: “Why did the team at Evil Empire decide to gradually unlock the Awakening conditions over the course of multiple runs, rather than just give them to you all at once like in Hades?” It’s not something I even considered until chat brought it up while I was streaming, but it is an interesting design choice. I could think of several good reasons for it.

Drip feeding them in that manner gives players and opportunity to slowly adjust and acclimate to taking on higher levels of awakening over time. The way the system is currently set up, there’s nothing realistically stopping me from turning on 40 Awakening’s worth of conditions from the very beginning and unlocking all the rewards from that in one run unless they give me one tablet at a time per clear. There are two ways I can think to interpret.

One, that Evil Empire was concerned that going from 0 to 40 was liable to burn players out, and giving them that control over which slabs they unlock is a way to get to slowly, deliberately onboarded. Holistically, it might be too daunting of a task, but broken down into chunks, players can acclimate to performing Awakening runs bit by bit.

Alternatively, and more cynically, one could interpret this to mean that Evil Empire thought it would be too easy to ramp from 0 to 40 unless they slowed down the pace at which players could unlock Awakenings. As a way to encourage players to play for longer and unlock all the skins, it was necessary to impose a cap and gradually lift that cap as the player completed more and more runs.

Neither one of these are mutually exclusive with the other, and it’s possible that both are true, or some other reason entirely. In my experience with the game having spent about 35-40 hours unlocking everything, I can say that much of the time I was choosing an Awakening slab that I thought “wouldn’t matter” as I was performing my run. (For example, “A medallion slot is destroyed when you lose an extra life” doesn’t matter because I don’t intend to get killed at any point. I can take that on without actually feeling any adverse effects from it that I might notice.) So many of those conditions read in that manner that it makes me wonder if the team realized that the challenge simply wasn’t there for the average player.

And yet, even knowing now that most of them are pretty easy to shrug off, I also remember the first time I interacted with Heat in Hades and how scary it felt for me to start willing performing at a higher level. Seeing the full list in front of you for the first time can be intimidating, even if you learn afterwards that most of these amplifiers aren’t too difficult to live with.

I can see it from both sides of the fence, and I don’t know where I stand.