It's 3.30 pm in Paris when we finally meet Patrice. His eyes are full of enthusiasm, his steps through the room are tense and it's clear that he has a deep desire to tell a story.
"I'm not here to explain the game, you will try it in few minutes. I'm here to tell you about how we found ourselves creating Ancestors."
"The demo allows you to read the game world through a very articulated HUD, but in the final version, in our concept idea, it won't be like this". The sentence that closes the intro on screen confirms Patrice's words, "Good luck, we will not help you much". Ancestors wants to deconstruct the key elements of the classic adventure games.
The demo, which was part of the game from the subtitle Volume: 1 - Before us, will catapult us into the wild of the African lands,10 million years ago, where our primate ancestors began their evolutionary journey. The game starts impersonating an adult specimen, an alpha male, killed by a predator, leaving his cub defenceless. The controls then pass to him and, once we've found a hideout, they move again to a female character nearby that hears the child crying for help.
"In Ancestors, you will not be a single character. The concept of unicum doesn't exist in the game: the protagonist is our whole species". The game then opens up to a non-linear adventure, made of emerging narrative, built by our actions. "Finally, you will notice that, even if there are various icons on the screen to help you, there's no map. Our ancestors had no maps other than mental maps that they built with their orientation. This game asks you to take some time to explore. He asks you to lose yourself ". Ancestors wants to make ancestral fears resurface in us: loss, fear of the unknown, sense of vulnerability. All elements that are scarce in the video game scene. The result is a steady authorial position: with these choices, Panache knows it can't please everyone and looks to those who accept the challenge of survival in its most genuine and - literally - primitive way.
But how Désilets and his team came up with such a unique concept? Well, a matter of survival: "Necessity is the mother of Invention, right? I needed an idea to create an open world. You know, once you explore those possibilities you can't go back to a linear game. Also, I needed a title that could be made by a small team. People now identify me as "The guy who makes historical games" so I also needed to build a historical setting within a project achievable by that small team. I don't know how exactly it went, but I came up with an idea of a group of characters who have connections between them. I also love prehistory: at that point, I said to myself "let's do it!" (...) I remember a discussion with Jean-Francois - Boivin - in which I told him "Let's go back to the beginning of everything!", and he replied: "You're crazy". I said: "No, it's a completely new thing. Think about it." So we also discussed it with the others and their response was: "Cool, let's play evolution!" From that moment, all the ideas for the mechanics of growth, expansion, evolution start to pop up.
The greatest opportunity provided by this concept, however, is to have a lot of freedom. "Even if I spent two years reading books about paleoanthropology I tried to forget as much as possible to focus on the game. I'm not a teacher, I'm a game designer. So I tried to be as accurate as possible where I believed it was necessary, and in the meantime, I took some freedom to avoid to get stuck.
The beauty of the subject is that the further you go back, the less you know. So we can invent a little bit. Let's think for example of the big bird of prey in the demo: for it, I was inspired by birds from Argentina. Unless you find the bones you can fantasize about. This is the beauty of palaeontology. Homo naledi was discovered by accident in the middle of a crypt (Désilets is referring to the Rising Star Cave, the caves that branch out below the site called the "Cradle of Humanity", 50km from Johannesburg, South Africa). A year ago, for example, we realized that Lucy, or rather her Australopithecus species, used tools because they found remains and deduced a connection.
In June 2018, the announcement of a collaboration with Private Division, the Take-Two Interactive subsidiary founded by Michael Worosz and Allen Murray, changed the plans for the better. Thanks to that partnership Panache can release a full game without splitting it into multiple episodes. I don't know how many we'll publish, I know how many I planned to create. There are three: Before us, it shows a temporal slice of time between 10 and 2 million years, before the genus Homo. Then Homo erectus (we deduce that the first chapter of Ancestors will end with the discovery of fire or earlier), Homo heidelbergensis and so on will be part of the second episode, called Almost us. And then the last volume will be titled The First of us. But this is still a distant future: it's what I have outlined and planned, but at the moment it all depends on our debut.
We can read his thought about that on the last Playstation Blog entry: I could see how the landscape of gaming was rapidly changing. There were lots of really talented studios releasing cool indie games while AAA quality games were getting bigger, more graphically stunning and offered almost infinite content. And in the middle, there was what seemed to be a huge void in what was being offered. Smaller AAA-quality games didn’t seem that viable. It was either small indies or gargantuan blockbusters. But with development tools more democratically available and digital downloads becoming the norm, I knew there was an opportunity to make something great even as an indie studio.
So I asked him what he thinks about Hamish Young's statement: according to the senior technical designer of Avalanche, the industry is going to calm down on tech and focus on creativity.
I think he's right. When I did Prince of Persia at Ubisoft we were 125 people, and we didn't have those kinds of tools. We had a proprietary engine that was the same one used for Beyond Good and Evil with lots of limitations. Now with those open tools, it's like having an army of programmers working for me, and this is great. Since these tools are now available to everyone, creativity is what makes the difference. It becomes a matter of subject. Once during a talk, I said: "I'm tired of the usual games set in Chicago or New York, I'm sick of clichés!" And immediately afterwards I made a game in Italy. You and I have a connection: Italy made me an adult. I was 17 when I arrived and left Italy that I was 18. So for me is an important moment in my life and I chose to create something to celebrate it. And now I'm developing a game set in Africa. I was also creating a title set in Amsterdam but...
On 26th April 2016, almost two years after the launch of Panache Digital Games, in a newsletter from the studio, Patrice announces that al the rights of Amsterdam 1666 are finally coming back in his hands. In the press release attached to the mail, we can read that Ubisoft and Désilets have agreed to put an end to the legal dispute with regards to project 1666 Amsterdam. Following the agreement, Désilets is withdrawing his legal action against Ubisoft from the Superior Court of Québec. The company thereby also gives the rights of project 1666 Amsterdam to Désilets, who will thereafter have all creative and business control over the project.
Maybe I'll create one set in Montreal. However, it's true, now it's a matter of content, creativity, and culture. In the coming days I will be in Croatia - for the Reboot Develop Blue 2019 -, and in that land, there's a lot of Eastern European studies that gave birth to really nice ideas like This War of Mine and Kingdom Come Deliverance. They are all games with a great deal of character, and those who developed them have all my respect.
And so yes, it's a matter of creativity and content. And people of course! Thanks to today's technology, 35 people can design great things. There are sequences in Ancestors where you climb a tree and look at the horizon, mesmerized: I can tell you all the names of those who produced that wonder. I can't tell you the names of those who made Assassin's Creed 2 instead.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is set to be released on PC on 27th August and in December on Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
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