Prince Of Persia’s creator has seen the series “struggle to find its identity” at Ubisoft, but thinks they’ve finally found an elegant solution

Jordan Mechner on the sands of time, and making games based in history

In the mind of Jordan Mechner, the sands of time flow both ways. It happens even when he doesn’t mean it to. When making the Myst -like adventure game The Last Express , he set his story on a train crossing Europe in 1914 - the same year Mechner’s own grandfather became a teenage refugee, his life in a Jewish enclave on the Austro-Hungarian border shattered.

“He was drafted as a soldier,” Mechner says. “So I’m sure that in the back of my mind, in creating The Last Express, I was thinking of the terrible impact that war had on Europe and my grandfather’s experience as well. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of these echoes are unconscious.”

Mechner may not have been thinking of his grandfather when drafting the Agatha Christie-esque adventures of Robert Cath, an American doctor on the run from the police. But the personal resonance can hardly be called a coincidence. History-making and storytelling is a habit in the Mechner family. That same grandfather, Adolf Mechner, wrote a memoir that filled 1,000 pages and four loose-leaf binders in the 1970s. It became a kind of family heirloom - one Mechner initially ignored while he got to grips with the Apple II.

Shortly after the memoir was finished, however, when Jordan was the same age his grandfather had been at the outbreak of war, he started writing his own journals. Some of those have since been published, as accounts of the development of Karateka and the original Prince Of Persia. Now, Mechner has written a non-fiction graphic novel, Replay. In it, he expertly weaves his own story with that of his father and grandfather, hopping between timelines as if living in all of them at once.

Image credit:DotEmu

“I’ve always been fascinated by history,” he says. “All of my games, from Karateka to Prince Of Persia to The Last Express, have been set in historical time periods. I think there’s a lot to be learned from the past that can help us understand and appreciate the present and project into the future.”

Mechner is speaking from New York, where his father and brother and much of his wider family still live. In an odd way, I feel like I’ve come to know them. In The Making of Karateka - the part-game, part-interactive museum released by Digital Eclipse last year - Mechner sits at the piano with his dad to recount the earliest years of his career. “That’s a format that will adapt itself very well to telling the stories of the creation of other games,” Mechner says. “ Prince Of Persia is of course a natural candidate. It’s been discussed, I hope it will happen.”

As it turns out, Mechner’s ambitions as a comic book writer pre-date his love affair with game design. But as a precocious teen, the arrival of the first generation of computers allowed him to get a headstart on a career in the creative arts. “Because the medium was so young, I could make a game on the same level as the professional games that were being sold in stores,” he says. “It was a chance for me to make something that could stand on its own and potentially be appreciated by a large audience. Without them just being like, ‘Oh, this was made by a kid.’”

Mechner’s first project with commercial potential was a version of Asteroids for home systems - right up until Atari began to clamp down on clones. But even in the age of the arcade, his storytelling instincts began to take hold. Mechner’s next game, Deathbounce, evolved from “just a triangular spaceship shooting in an abstract situation” to showing the pilot climb into the craft at the start of a level, telling an implicit tale of brave Earth defence.

It was only a matter of time before the storytelling took centre stage. Karateka, developed while Mechner was skipping his classes at Yale, followed a hero through a series of one-on-one martial arts fights as he ascended a fortress to save the princess Mariko. While crude by today’s standards, it’s sometimes considered the birthplace of cinematic gaming. Mechner had filmed his mother’s karate teacher with a Super 8 camera over summer break, then traced the footage frame-by-frame to create rotoscoped animation. The smooth character motion wowed players, and Mecher developed it further over the course of the ‘90s.

Image credit:Digital Eclipse

“I used rotoscoping in Karateka and Prince Of Persia, for action-arcade movements - fighting, running and jumping,” he says. “I had gone to film school and was always fascinated by cinematic language and the nuances of dialogue and directing actors. The Last Express was a way to bring those two things together, to make a game that also told a deeper and more multilayered story than I’d been able to.”

The development of The Last Express was, in part, a movie production - a 22-day shoot in which the actors who made up the main cast were photographed in makeup and costume against a bluescreen. The resulting frames were drained of their colour and then turned into drawings, coloured by hand. In the game, they’re artfully arranged to create the illusion of Austrian violinists and Russian counts moving between the carriages of the Orient Express, engaging in conversation and, occasionally, violence.

“The rotoscoping for The Last Express was really a way to capture the nuances of an actor’s performance, the body language and the facial expressions, and yet to do that in a way that was stylized,” Mechner says. “The visual inspiration was graphic novels and Art Nouveau. I didn’t want it to look like digitised video - I wanted it to look like an animated pen-and-ink drawing that had magically come to life.”

The Last Express took four years to make - a lifetime in ‘90s game development. On launch it won awards, but went unnoticed by the broader gaming audience. “There was a moment, because of the success of Myst, that we imagined that point-and-click adventure games would sell millions of copies, like arcade-action games,” Mechner says. “But that didn’t happen, Myst was the only one. When we were making The Last Express, the genre that was really exploding was real-time 3D multiplayer games, like Doom and Quake .”

Nonetheless, The Last Express remains an underappreciated masterpiece - its performances and tangible old world atmosphere still standing up. And ultimately, Mechner’s conviction that animated actors were the future of gaming was borne out. The gushing cover quote of Replay comes from Naughty Dog creative head Neil Druckmann, who in many ways has shaped the games industry in Mechner’s image. “Incredible evocative,” Druckmann writes of Replay. “A powerful emotional experience.”

Like Druckmann, who co-created The Last of Us as a TV series for HBO, Mechner has a knack for adapting his own work. When Yves Guillemot called him in 2001 to propose that Ubisoft make a new Prince Of Persia, Mechner hit it off with the team. “I didn’t realise that I was going to end up moving to Montreal and writing the script and being so involved in that project,” he says. “It was really that I fell in love with it and wanted to do it.

“With a new generation of consoles, there was something about Prince Of Persia that almost magically fit the kind of game that we were wanting to make. That’s something that doesn’t happen so often in one’s career, so when we felt that excitement happening, I just went all in.” The game’s signature rewind mechanic is actually an echo of a similar tool in The Last Express. Time has a way of working itself into practically everything Mechner works on.

Later, Mechner took Prince Of Persia to Hollywood, pursuing his cinematic inclinations to their logical conclusion. He cut together a trailer out of PlayStation 2 footage and played it to Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer as part of his pitch for a movie. “I knew that I wouldn’t be taken seriously,” he says. “That in Hollywood at that time, the idea of a game creator wanting to write the screenplay for the film adaptation would be viewed with great suspicion. The story that I pitched and wrote had to stand on its own merits.”

Mechner proved persuasive. The Prince was played by Jake Gyllenhaal, opposite Gemma Arterton and Ben Kingsley, and the resulting movie was the highest-grossing Hollywood adaptation of a videogame until 2016’s Warcraft. As a student of film, Mechner went in with eyes wide open, and is philosophical about how much of his work made it to the screen. “I knew that Jerry Bruckheimer in particular likes to have multiple screenwriters work on a film, and of course that’s exactly what happened,” he says. “With Prince Of Persia, I was the first of five writers. But the draft was solid enough to get the film made.”

In the decades since, the Prince has mostly lain dormant, as a Sands of Time sequel morphed into Assassin’s Creed. “For a while there, Prince Of Persia at Ubisoft had to struggle to find its identity as clearly separate and distinct from Assassin’s Creed,” Mechner says. “You can see that in the 2008 reboot, and then several Prince Of Persia projects that were developed and cancelled, that didn’t go the distance.”

Mechner himself moved to Montpellier in 2016 to work on one such project - greenlit with an eight-figure budget and an intended team of several hundred people. It’s a story told in the course of Replay with wry self-deprecation. In one scene, Mechner enthuses in his LA bathroom about the prospect of a sprawling, open-world Prince Of Persia. The interjections of his wife, Whitney, about the capacity of AAA development to destroy lives and families, go unanswered as Mechner enthuses about riding across Persia on horseback, camel or magic carpet.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Over time, things slid sideways - Ubisoft deciding that the project should drop the Prince Of Persia setting in order to avoid a huge investment in an IP the publisher didn’t own. Today, Mechner still lives in Montpellier, but is dedicated to writing and drawing his graphic novels. Meanwhile, at long last, a new team in the same city has found a fitting shape for Prince Of Persia in 2024 with The Lost Crown .

“I’m very happy to see that they found a really elegant solution to that question of identity, by returning to the game’s 2D roots as a Metroidvania semi-open world,” Mechner says. “But also with beautifully stylised graphics, combat and animation that pays homage to the original Prince Of Persia and to The Sands Of Time - and fulfils gamers’ expectations while being very, very distinct.”

There’s a circular poeticism to the fact that Mechner, the New Yorker, has found a home in France - the same country his father fled through during the Second World War on the way to America. And that Prince Of Persia, which started in New York, has found its place in Montpellier too. None of this is lost on Mechner.

“We could say that these time echoes are accidental,” he says. “But it’s difficult to find which direction causality flows in. In the opening of The Sands Of Time, I have the Prince say that time doesn’t flow in just one direction. It’s like an ocean in a storm. And then in writing and drawing Replay, I found things that I couldn’t explain simply in terms of logical sequence. There’s a conversation between the past and present. I can’t explain it, but I can appreciate it.”

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/co2njq.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Prince Of Persia’s creator has seen the series “struggle to find its identity” at Ubisoft, but thinks they’ve finally found an elegant solution - 8”>

Karateka

iOS , PS3 , Xbox 360 , PC

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/Prince_of_Persia_1989_cover.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Prince Of Persia’s creator has seen the series “struggle to find its identity” at Ubisoft, but thinks they’ve finally found an elegant solution - 9”>

Prince of Persia (1989)

PC

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/co2thd.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Prince Of Persia’s creator has seen the series “struggle to find its identity” at Ubisoft, but thinks they’ve finally found an elegant solution - 10”>

The Last Express

iOS , PC

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

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ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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