Ubisoft Toronto has now joined development of the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake.
In a tweet from their official account, Ubisoft Toronto shared this message:
“Ubisoft Toronto is joining the development of the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time!
We’re excited to rewind time and bring our studio’s creativity, expertise and updated tech to refresh this beloved classic with our partners at @UbisoftMTL (Ubisoft Montreal).”
As a reminder, Ubisoft announced this remake in 2021, and was led by India based studios Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai. In 2022, Ubisoft Montreal had taken over the project, and seemingly restarted the project from scratch.
While Ubisoft kept much of what had happened here secret, it was not secret that the early previews of the project was received very poorly by the public. While Ubisoft’s desire to mold their new global studios to be AAA worthy was admirable, that effort came at the expense of this remake itself.
Ubisoft Toronto happens to be also working on a remake of their own, for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. With that in mind, why would Ubisoft take their attention away from that project, especially when they had just announced it?
Well, it’s important to remember that last November, Ubisoft Montreal had revealed that the project had reached a significant milestone, which seems to have brought the project that much closer to completion. So this move seems to be about rushing development of this title to get it to the finish line as soon as possible.
Now, as soon as possible may still take longer than we would want. If we assume that 2022 was a real restart of the project, we may not see this game until 2027.
But that may be the point of appending Ubisoft Toronto to this project. Ubisoft may see that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is shaping up so well that it appears to be a guaranteed hit at this time. Given the spate of Ubisoft’s money and behind the scenes issues, they will want to fast track as many guaranteed projects as they can.
With all that said, we don’t know how much faster this project is going then. Will we see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2026, or maybe even 2025? It certainly looks highly unlikely, but if this port is a straightforward remake, then their work is mostly focused on polish and not creating something new out of the source material.
For now, Ubisoft has XDefiant and Assassin’s Creed to get them by, and they seem likely to keep Ubisoft stable for some time.Ub
