Prince of Persia

"You have quite a lot to unlearn in the combat system of this game. This is not a game that rewards button-mashing anywhere - not in acrobatics nor in combat. Button-mashers don't have fun until they unlearn to not mash the button," he says. "What we want, as a player experience, is sitting back, pressing the buttons more methodically and strategically, and therefore getting sucked into the flow of the game - rather than the aggressive, spastic button-mashing that other combat games sometimes feature."

As a seasoned button-masher, your graceless correspondent begins hammering out button combos. Just as Mattes warned, it doesn't work. So he tries to break it down further: "There's a large window of opportunity in between each button-press, and you don't ever need to press the button more than once. You can press B and literally wait almost a full second before you need to input the next key. See that freeze, that slowdown there? We have that in between every move."

We do our best to follow his instructions, but old habits die hard. There are moments where we can't resist the temptation to simply hammer away at the X button. This produces a flurry of slashes which, to be honest, seems to be at least as effective as B-wait-A-wait-X-wait. It's neither as spectacular or as satisfying though, and besides, we're only dealing tutorial level enemies at this point.

Mattes skips ahead to a later point in the game to show what happens when you're dealing with the big boys. Or rather, big boy, as you only ever face off with one enemy at a time in Prince of Persia. In this instance, it's the hulking great Hunter previously seen in the video on Eurogamer TV (skip ahead to 1m 40s).

The Hunter is capable of entering various "states" where it's impervious to certain attacks. "States serve multiple purposes," says Mattes. "They mix up combat and they are also a strategic thing; they help us make sure players aren't just button-mashing, doing the same combo over and over again." And that's not all: "The enemy will adopt states to intelligently counteract the type of attack you are favouring." So our X-hammering trick doesn't work for long; the Hunter enters a state where it's protected against sword attacks, and we're forced to try combos instead.

We fail. The action slows right down, the Hunter moves in for the kill and a big B button symbol appears on the screen. Being a veteran of quick-time events as well as button-mashing, we press B instinctively, and sure enough the prince rolls out of the path of the enemy's attack. Yes, Mattes confirms, the prince has survived. But there's a penalty to pay - the enemy has regained health. According to Mattes, the idea behind this is to stop players whittling the health of enemies down bit by bit.

It feels awfully quick-time eventy, though, and many gamers aren't keen on quick-time events. Isn't Mattes worried about this? "I'm a little surprised to hear you call it 'quick-time eventy,'" he says. Well, the action goes all slo-mo, and a big button symbol appears on the screen, and you've got a split-second to press the corresponding button, and if you don't something bad happens. "We do have quick-time events, for sure," says Mattes. "To tell you the truth we added those button symbols on the screen a couple of weeks ago, because people were having a really hard time understanding what button to press, based just off of the supporting means.

"I think your eye is being attracted to that button, but there's a lot of supporting information we use to explain to the player what they need to do in that particular situation." However, Mattes admits, "It wasn't enough, so we added the buttons."