The WiLD game was announced nearly seven years ago (and if that doesn’t sound as rough, we’ll put it in perspective: a whole console generation has passed in this period!), and it might never be released at this rate…
Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil, revealed WiLD at Gamescom in 2014 for PlayStation 4. He has since retired to work in the wildlife. Since then, we have seen some gameplay, concept artwork, and a single off-screen image. And that might be it, according to VentureBeat’s Jeff Grubb, who talked about the game on his podcast.
The online survival adventure was meant to be set ten thousand years ago when humanity and nature stood an equal chance of survival. The game’s world featured various real and fantastical creatures, and the players would have learned about the world as their characters grew older. While the concept of WiLD sounds… wild, Grubb could “confirm that game is fully done. There is no WiLD anymore… WiLD is dead.”
He added that the reason behind the game being binned is because of Michel Ancel. He had “abandoned the project” when he retired from the industry (even though he openly claimed that both Beyond Good & Evil 2 and WiLD were in good hands). A week after he announced his retirement, a French publication, Libération, published an article about his toxic behaviour at Ubisoft, to which he said fake news. Then, we saw that wild Sheep Studio put up some job offers, hinting at the continuation of WiLD (which is still listed as an active project).
“The team that was working on it was looking at maybe trying to stay together and work on other projects. I don’t know what happened with that, but they were like, ‘we’re not working on [WiLD] anymore, but we do have a lot of talent here, so maybe we can work on some stuff,” Grubb said. The studio currently has nearly 50 employees and is still recruiting for several positions.
It’s not official yet, but let’s be honest: since WiLD was announced, not much has happened. We jumped a console generation since.
Source: PSL
