 The Ubisoft Montreal team decided on taking the gameplay from "The Sands of Time" into an open world approach, taking advantage of the improved processing power to render larger spaces and crowds.Narratively, the team wanted to move away from the Prince being someone next in line for the throne but to have to work for it; combined with research into secret societies led them to focus on the Assassins, heavily borrowing from the novel "Alamut".They developed a narrative where the player would control an Assassin that served as a bodyguard for a non-playable Prince, leading them to call this game "Prince of Persia