Former Ubisoft designer Michel Ancel has said the way his game Wild was handled was “a real scandal”.
Wild was a survival game which was announced in 2014. It was set to be a PS4 exclusive, to be published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and developed by Ancel’s newly formed indie developer Wild Sheep Studio.
However, following Ancel’s departure from the games industry in 2020, the future of Wild remained unclear, with journalist Jeff Grubb claiming the following year that it had been cancelled.
Now, in an interview with Superpouvior, Ancel has explained what happened to Wild, blaming Ubisoft for the way it took over the project then “literally crushed” it, in his view.
“Wild had an unfortunate fate,” Ancel recalled. “In 2018, we had a very nice playable version, but we took a long time to upgrade the game to PS5, which slowed down production. On Sony’s side, there were major management changes and the game was stopped.
“Ubisoft offered to take it over, and shortly afterwards Sony decided to get it back, even offering to double our budgets. Unfortunately, contracts with Ubisoft were well advanced and we turned down Sony’s offer. What a shame.”
Ancel claims the game’s real problems started when the game was handed over to Ubisoft Paris and taken over by Tommy François, who ended up leaving the company after being accused of sexual misconduct.
“It was during this period that I burned out and, unfortunately, the game fell into the hands of Ubisoft’s editorial department in Paris, which was itself in chaos,” Ancel explained.
“I was no longer there to defend the game, which was literally crushed by people in this department who were asking for all sorts of changes without actually playing the game. A real scandal. After two years of wandering, the game was abandoned on the pretext that it no longer corresponded to the initial game.
“It’s important to understand that, at the time, the editorial department was in the midst of an explosion following the internal affairs surrounding Tommy François, who, incidentally, was in charge of Wild.”
Ancel said he would “be very happy” to share the playable demo videos of both Wild and Beyond Good & Evil 2 from 2018, both of which he describes as “more than promising”.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ancel said he left the industry because the issues facing development of Beyond Good & Evil 2 and Wild led to him suffering from burnout.
“In hindsight, I think we can talk about a real burnout that took place at the end of 2019,” he revealed. “At that point, my two flagship projects were drifting apart for various reasons. I should have taken a break a long time ago, but instead I kept working even harder.
“At the beginning of 2020, I decided to stop everything, especially as my family life was seriously affected by my burn-out. I had mismanaged my energy and no longer had the strength to continue in video games.”