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Ancestors is the first game of Panache, a developer based in Montreal and co-founded by the creator of Assassin's Creed, Patrice Désilets. It presents a historic setting and allows climbing in large vertical environments, but the opposite is that the game takes place 10,000,000 years ago. You do not play an assassin: you play like a monkey. And you do not climb buildings in ancient cities: you climb vast prehistoric trees extending into the canopy of the jungle.
"It all started with the need to create a toolbox for a brand new studio," says Désilets, who worked on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and on the first two Assassin's Creed games. "People say that I am the historical type of the open world, is not it? But, in reality, I create characters that interact with 3D worlds."
"The Prince in Sands of Time, he runs on the walls and swings.With Altaïr and Ezio 's Assassin' s Creed, it 's about climbing and l'. Interacting with big crowds – that's really the heart of my job, and for this new project, I needed a character who could interact with a 3D world in an interesting way. "
One night, Désilets told me, the idea of putting a game in a prehistoric setting came to him in a flash. "It would be easier for the new studio, because we would not have to create a city or a society, or to make the player interact with the technology," he explains. "It would be just this character in a primitive organic environment, but we soon realized that bio was not easy at all."
Ancestors is a third-person survival game set in an open world. You start out as a relatively primitive monkey, but as you go along, you evolve: find out how to use tools or build a place to sleep. As you play, the neurons are activated in your monkey's brain, which acts as an improvement tree. And you learn how to: develop new social skills by interacting with other monkeys, or new motor skills by choosing and experimenting with objects such as sticks, rocks and plants.
When I climbed into a tree and found a coconut, I could not do anything with it. My monkey just looked stupidly at the thing. But later, when I developed the ability to use both hands, I was able to take the coconut in one hand and pebble in the other and break it. When I understood this, I felt like a monkey since the beginning of 2001: an odyssey of space when he discovered how to use a bone as a club. I could almost hear Strauss playing. It was awesome.
Neurons are activated in your monkey's brain, which acts as an improvement tree
"I was bored with everything that's going on in 10,000 years in British Columbia," says Désilets. "People are walking in animal skins and swinging clubs, so I looked back 10,000,000 years ago, let's be that monkey in the tree that came down and s & # 39; "It's a pretty cool fantasy, no?" We still have that instinct buried in our mind, even as a modern human, so why not play it? "
"I was reading books on paleoanthropology, I followed the timeline and science, explaining how we became biped, and we designed the game based on this trip.In the beginning, it was episodic because I did not know it. did not have much money, so to be a shorter game.But then the private division came and said forget, we will give you enough money to make the game you want.
I spent a lot of time with the ancestors feeling confused, as if I was looking for a switch in a dark room. The game is reluctant to say how one of its systems works. But this is, as far as I know, by design. It's seemingly opaque about making you use your instinct to understand things. I like that in theory, but I think it could do with a little more insights on how things work exactly, just to make it easier for new players.
Certainly, when I found something myself, the satisfaction was rather immense. When I threw my first fish into a river with a pointed stick, I felt like the most intelligent monkey that ever lived. And when you realize something like this, it helps your evolution via a scoring system, and you can try to move on to the next evolutionary time at any time, even if you are remembered for all the mistakes that you do. I fell off a cliff trying to collect honey in a hive, and I think that has delayed my evolution a lot.
You decide how you want to evolve and how fast
"You decide how you want to evolve and how fast," says Désilets. "It's a game full of talking systems, and you create your own experiences through these systems, and even if you see the Matrix as I do when I play every day, unexpected things can happen again. This great monkey is inside We are ready to survive in the jungle, it will be difficult, but it's in us In the first prototype, the game was more explicit about telling you what do, but now you have to understand And when you do it, it's a moment of epiphany.
"Our job as game makers is to make sure that everything a player thinks or thinks is taken into account, but we do not do anything, we say too little. need to tweak it, but it's conscious.The decision for the players in this game to rely on their instinct.Some players will probably bounce it, but I'm not worried about it.Some people do not like The Beatles, you know, you can create new ones to please everyone. "
I ask Désilets if it is easier to create a unique and weird game like this at the time he was working on the first Assassin's Creed. "I do not need to sell 25 million copies to make a buck," he says. "It helps! But people tend to forget that the first Assassin's Creed was very pretty too, I mean, I created a game about crusades, politics, religion and another one that would take place in the future and that was a sci-fi story Even with Sands of Time, Ubisoft placed us in a small booth next to the E3 They were like: what is C & F Is this game?
"I'm not a good game designer," he continues. "I'm doing my thing and it takes a bit of time for it to make sense.In AC1, you sit on benches and you walk in the crowd.It's not a game of running to kill people. with slides Tell me that it taught them things about life.Last year, a game designer told me that Assassin's Creed had prompted him to embark on industry, which he called a Trojan horse and he was absolutely right.
"You have the word assassin in the title but people forget the creed part. The players come in thinking, cool, I'm going to be a killer! Then they realize that it's a little deeper than that. We deceive them. And it's the same with the ancestors, really. We are still these great apes at the bottom, but we are now in a controlled environment. Biologically, we are wired to survive in a difficult environment, but that does not really exist anymore. So we invented a hostile environment. "
"There are no leopards running, but we are anxious and we have this [points to his stomach] because when we get sugar, our brain tells us that we need more, because you never know when you will not get them. It's the primitive brain at work. We do not have to hunt, we just go to the grocery store, and this is not good for us, man! It's not all about these deep themes, though. Above all, playing as a monkey is only a fun experience. But they are definitely here. "
Ancestors was released in 2020 and much remains to be done to refine and communicate its systems. I also found the climb a little frustrating, especially when I fell to the ground, broke my legs and had to limp or sleep until they recovered. But I can not criticize his imagination, and I've never played such a title. Desilets is passionately passionate about the project and I think that with a little refinement, it could be quite special.
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