WiLD, from Wild Sheep Studio of Ubisoft, was meant to take the genre to new heights, but was ultimately cancelled after a scandal-ridden development…

There are some legendary game developers whose careers have been in shambles. It seems that Michel Ancel, the famous creator of Rayman, is joining that list. Ancel, who has been with Ubisoft since the 90s, created his own studio called Wild Sheep in 2014, without leaving the French company. Thanks to this, he was able to start developing WiLD, a PlayStation-exclusive open world that “wanted to change the genre forever.” However, it turns out that it was quietly cancelled in 2024. Now, Ancel has come forward and made it clear that the reason WiLD didn’t happen was because Ubisoft refused Sony’s budget increase.

WiLD’s journey was quite chaotic. As mentioned, the debut game of Ubisoft subsidiary Wild Sheep was announced in 2014, which was an open-world survival game concept for PS4. In this case, the project was set in Neolithic times, with a procedurally generated world where we could control a shamanic person with the ability to control animals in a multiplayer or single-player environment, with climatic elements, hunting and the like.

However, Ancel was constantly jumping back and forth between this project and the licenses recognized by Ubisoft, so the development of WiLD was delayed.

In 2020, the creative left the industry entirely after being severely accused of a “toxic work culture”. However, for Ancel, the key moment that marked the WiLD scandal was in 2018 when the game reached a worrying standstill, and Ubisoft took over the project.

The Ubisoft-management was “disastrous” in the final years of WiLD

Speaking to Superpouvoir, Ancel called Ubisoft’s management at the time “a real scandal.” “The game was literally destroyed by arbitrary decisions and changes demanded by people who hadn’t even played it,” Ancel said. He said that Tommy François’ management, who would later be accused of abuse, went so far as to refuse a budget injection offered by Sony to get the project off the ground.

“We already had a perfect playable version in 2018, but it took a long time to update the game for PS5, which slowed down production within Ubisoft. Shortly after, Sony decided to reinvest in the IP and even offered to double our budget,” which Ubisoft declined. “It was a shame,” he adds of the rejection, which resulted in the parent company taking over the project entirely and then shutting it down.

The situation, he adds, affected not only the development of WiLD, but also the well-being of the creator. Ancel admitted that he suffered from burnout due to the stress of both the project and Beyond Good & Evil 2. Although WilLD was officially cancelled, Ancel was willing to share videos of gameplay demos, which he called “more than promising.”

Source: Superpouvoir, PSU