The latest tease for Ubisoft's laggard Sands of Time remake was very silly.
Just one week after adding Ubisoft Toronto to the list of studios trying to get Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake finished, Ubisoft gave us a new release target during its big livestream today—and it's, uh, 2026.
That seems like an awful lot of time to remake a game that already exists, especially with two of Ubisoft's biggest studios on the case—because remember, Ubisoft Montreal is still working on it too. But it's already been in the works for twice that amount of time, although to be fair it was completely rebooted in 2023 for reasons that have never been made clear.
By that metric, then, it'll only be three years of development time, which is still a long haul unless the plan is to significantly change the game—but if that's the case, why not just make a whole new game?
Regardless of its reasons, Ubisoft pretty clearly has nothing to show for the time and effort that's been put into the Sands of Time Remake so far, because the big reveal today was this:
And that's it. A window. A candle. 2026. Have a nice day.
Although that's not quite it. It goes entirely unmentioned but there's also been a slight name change: The "Remake" part of the title has been dropped, and it's now called simply Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, this is the Sands of Time Remake website yesterday:
And here it is today:
Notice that it's also now referred to as "a Ubisoft Original," a branding the company adopted in 2021 to denote internally-developed games. What's the significance? Probably none: Four studios have thus far worked on the Sands of Time Remake, but they're all internal Ubi operations.
No reason for the name change was provided (it's literally just a picture of a candle!) but it does make me wonder if maybe Ubisoft really is making comprehensive changes to the game, and it's dropped the "Remake" part of the title to better reflect that. For now it's just an odd little shift in direction, but it's also the most interesting part of the reveal, which I don't think reflects particularly well on the state of things after four years of work.
On the other hand, Beyond Good and Evil 2 was announced in 2008 and Ubisoft has promised us at least 24 times since then (as of January 2023, when we got tired of counting) that it's still in development, and it didn't even get a mention at today's show. So what do I know?
I've reached out to Ubisoft to ask about the change and will update if I receive a reply.
