Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake Delayed From January to March 2021

The Prince’s dagger might give him the ability to rewind time, but even having that power in real-life wouldn’t help much with wrapping development on his upcoming remake. No, Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai simply need a bit more time on the new remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and so they’re taking it.

Instead of launching on Jan. 21, 2021, the new version of Sands of Time will now debut on March 18, 2021. The remake is still targeting PC (via the Epic Games Store and UPlay), PlayStation 4, and Xbox One at $39.99. It’ll be playable on the new consoles via backward compatibility, but no hardware-specific upgrades are planned.

The Prince of Persia team’s announcement on Twitter doesn’t go into detail on the reasons behind the two month delay, instead only giving a nod to how 20202 “has been a year like no other,” prompting the move to take additional time on the game. Whether the remake’s development was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the internal strife at Ubisoft that came to light this past summer, or both, it’s still just a relatively short delay.

Just over a month ago, Ubisoft announced delays for two of its more prominent, full-price 2021 releases. Both Rainbow Six Quarantine and Far Cry 6 (which had previously locked in a February release date) have been pushed into Ubisoft’s next fiscal year. Both titles are now expected to launch between April and Sept. 2021.

USG’s former Reviews Editor Mike Williams got to talk to Ubisoft Mumbai game director Pierre-Sylvain Gires and Ubisoft Pune senior producer Annu Koul about the Sands of Time remake ahead of its reveal earlier this year. Their thoughts on tackling the project—Ubisoft’s first remake—are certainly worth checking out, especially as they pertain to preseving the original while also bringing “the materials, the color, [and] the architecture” of India into the remake.

“When creating the remake, we have to think about the mo-cap, the cinematic feeling, because nowadays the games which we make are a bit different. You have to be very realistic in terms of materials, in terms of every single detail,” Koul says. “Even for the music, we wanted to have the original music of the game. We went to Montreal—we actually tried to find the tapes where the music was stored 17 years back. We found them in boxes. It was a very long process and a very good journey.”