Rayman creator Michel Ancel's open-world game Wild has reportedly been put to pasture. The game was originally announced at Gamescom 2014, after which seven years of relatively little news followed. The Wild dev team is still reportedly looking to work on new projects.
What do we know about Wild's cancellation?
This news comes via games journalist Jeff Grubb, who revealed it during a Giant Bomb video (thanks, VGC). In the video, Grubb says Wild is "fully done", and that the game is completely dead. According to Grubb, the Wild development team is still looking to create a game but is no longer actively working on Wild. Grubb said Ancel "abandoned" the project, and seems to imply that Wild died after Ancel ceased working on it. Reportedly, the development team says it "[has] a lot of talent here", so it wants to continue looking into alternative options.
What happened to Wild, and is Michel Ancel to blame?
Michel Ancel's Wild was originally announced back at Gamescom in 2014. The footage showed a tribesman both battling and interacting with animals, but it didn't have any gameplay to offer. A year later, in 2015, Ancel and his team debuted gameplay footage, which showed off the player riding animals, inhabiting the body of a hawk, and battling torch-wielding enemies. The game was originally described as a survival experience "devoted to the wilderness", set 10,000 years ago.
Wild went radio silent for almost a year and a half following the 2015 Paris Games Week footage. In January 2017, Michel Ancel posted screenshots of Wild on his Instagram page, pledging to try and post "regularly" about the game. Naturally, this didn't materialize, and Wild vanished into...well...the wild for another two and a half years. In 2020, Michel Ancel announced his retirement from the video game industry. He claimed Wild was in good hands and that the development team was "autonomous"; according to Ancel, progress was going "super well", but it seems that is no longer the case.
After Ancel's retirement in 2020, reports surfaced about his toxic management style when working on Ubisoft's Beyond Good and Evil 2. It's not clear whether this style was unproductive enough to lead to significant issues during Wild's development. Still, it might not be a coincidence that both projects have had relatively little revealed about them in the long time since they were released. Of course, in BG&E2's case, that could also be down to Ubisoft's widespread toxic internal work culture. Here's hoping the Wild development team can pick itself up and get to work on something else soon.
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