“Itallstartedfromtheneedtobuildupa
toolbox for a brand new studio,” says
Désilets, who worked on Prince of Persia:
The Sands of Time and the first two
Assassin’s Creed games with Ubisoft.
“People say I’m the historical open world
guy, right? But, really, what I do is create
characters who interact with 3D worlds.
“The Prince in Sands of Time, he runs
on walls and swings. With Altaïr and Ezio
from Assassin’s Creed it’s all about the
climbing and interacting with large
crowds. This is really the core of my craft,
and for this new project I needed a
character who could interact with a 3D
world in an interesting way.”
One night, Désilets says, the idea to set
a game in a prehistoric setting came to
him in a flash. “This would be easier for the
new studio, because we wouldn’t have to
build a city or a society, or have the player
interact with technology,” he explains. “It
would just be this character in a primitive,
organic environment. But we soon
realised that organic isn’t easy at all. It’s
just as hard in some ways. You can’t have
any hard edges.”
Ancestors is a third-person survival
game set in an open world. You begin as a
relatively primitive ape, but over the
course of the game you evolve, figuring
out how to use tools, or even something as
basic as using both hands at once.
As you play neurones are fired in your
ape’s brain, which acts like an upgrade
tree. And you learn by doing, developing
new social skills by interacting with other
apes, or new motor skills by picking up
and experimenting with objects such as
sticks and rocks.
To give you an example, when I first
climbed a tree and found a coconut, I
couldn’t do anything with it. My ape just
stared dumbly at the thing. But then, later,
when I developed the ability to use both
hands, I was able to pick up the coconut in
one hand, and a rock in the other, and
smash it open.
When I figured this out I felt like that
ape from the beginning of 2001: A Space
Odyssey when he figured out how to use a
bone as a club. I could almost hear Also
sprach Zarathustra playing. It felt great.
“I was bored of the whole 10,000 BC
thing,” says Désilets. “People going
around in animal skins and swinging clubs.
So I looked back further, to 10,000,000
years in the past. Let’s be that ape in the
tree who came down and stood up. That’s
a pretty cool fantasy, right? We still have
this instinct buried in the back of our
minds as humans, so why not play it?
“I read books on paleoanthropology. I
was following the timeline and the science,
about how we became bipedal, and we
designed the game around that journey.
Originally it was episodic because I didn’t
have a lot of money, so it would have to
be a shorter game.
“But then Private Division came in and
said forget that, we’ll give you enough
money to make the game you want.”LEARNING AND EVOLVING
I played two hours of Ancestors and I
spent most of that session feeling
confused, like I was fumbling around in a
dark room for a light switch.
The game is stubbornly reluctant to
telegraph how any of its systems work.
But this is, as far as I can tell, by design. It’sA
ncestors is the first game from Panache,
a Montreal-based developer co-founded
by Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice
Désilets. It features a historical setting
and climbing large, vertical environments, but
the twist here is that the game is set 10,000,000
years in the distant past. You don’t play an
assassin, you play as an ape. And you aren’t
climbing buildings in ancient cities, you’re
climbing vast prehistoric trees.
A survival game set 10,000,000
years in the past
ANCESTORS:
THE HUMANKIND
ODYSSEY
OVER THE COURSE OF THE
GAME YOU EVOLVE, FIGURING
OUT HOW TO USE TOOLSRELEASE
2020
DEVELOPER
PanachePUBLISHER
Private DivisionLINK
http://www.ancestorsgame.comNEED TO KNOW
PLAYED
ITPREVIEW
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey