Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake has been in development for quite a few years now, and the development has been quite tumultuous thus far. The game has been taken back to the drawing board following a negative fan reception, but now, thanks to hacker and insider Lance McDonald, we’ve learned that the Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake was far close to a launch than perhaps any of us had previously realised.
Having been unveiled in September of 2020, it seemed as though Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake was on track for a fairly rapid release, but the game was immediately slammed for its visual design, and only months later rumours began to swirl that the game was going to be delayed. In February 2021 that became official, the game being delayed beyond its intended March 2021 release window. After skipping E3 2021, the game was again delayed, to a point where we exist now, desperate, delayed, and dateless. Earlier this year, we learned that both Ubisoft Mumbai, and Ubisoft Pune, the teams responsible for development on the game, had been removed from the project, with Ubisoft Montreal taking the lead on everything going forward.
Now, thanks to McDonald, we’ve learned that the game, prior to the myriad of delays that it has faced, was in fact in a near-finished state, with the game even being playable on PSN. McDonald quote-tweeted a “Saved You A Click Video Games” tweet that had outlined that pre-orders for Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake had been cancelled with the game’s indefinite delay, and said,
This was actually finished, went gold, went through Sony certification and was uploaded to the PlayStation network servers, where some people clever were able to preserve it and even decrypt it using their pre-order encryption keys. I wonder what the hell happened.
When a commenter suggested that the delay was because of the controversies around the game’s visuals, McDonald expanded with some of his own thinking,
Maybe that was the case! They could have been planning on a huuuuuge day-1 patch to be applied to the build that they’d already pushed through certification and just never were able to follow through with it.
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Remake is slated to come to PS4, Xbox One, and PC, but with the delays, those could yet change when the game finally launches.