Life of the Party
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Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey - ape evolution game from Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Desilets
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Life of the Party
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Polygon said:
Life of the Party
Arcane
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Millions of years... evolution... I see he's chosen to make his game in a fantasy setting
Ellef
Deplorable
'Humankind'
Into the trash it goes.
Into the trash it goes.
Pika-Cthulhu
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When is the thal master race DLC due?
Life of the Party
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Great Deceiver
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You can picture the focus group sessions perfectly - "but why mankind odyssey? let's change it to humankind odyssey, it's 2018!"
Complete, utter cuck garbage.
Complete, utter cuck garbage.
Dexter
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"Do you want to play as a Male or Female or should we go Random."
"People can enjoy being in Africa 10 million years ago."
Playing as an ape in Africa millions of years ago.
Not sure if Problematic or Heresy.
This looks interesting though, at least it's something different again. Not sure about the Gameplay mechanics though, there's a lot of weird "Screenmodes" again and it seems to mainly be a Survival game.
"People can enjoy being in Africa 10 million years ago."
Playing as an ape in Africa millions of years ago.
Not sure if Problematic or Heresy.
This looks interesting though, at least it's something different again. Not sure about the Gameplay mechanics though, there's a lot of weird "Screenmodes" again and it seems to mainly be a Survival game.
Pika-Cthulhu
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No trans option? EUGH IGNORANT!
Life of the Party
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Duraframe300
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The one title that managed to get under the radar as an Epic Store Exclusive.
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Life of the Party
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Surviving in the wild: Assassin's Creed maker Patrice Désilets on Ancestors, his first game in nearly a decade
"One of the pleasures is to find how you stop bleeding."
Few video game industry firings make the headlines, and fewer still get to sound as dramatic as the tale of Assassin's Creed co-creator Patrice Désilets getting the boot from Ubisoft, six years ago. Relieved of his services mere months after rejoining the company, Désilets was escorted out his office by security without being able to clear his desk or say goodbye to his team. I've heard the story several times over the years, as well as accounts of what may have caused it, but now I'm hearing the highlights first-hand, as Désilets introduces himself and his new game via a potted history of past escapades.
I hadn't expected Désilets to dwell on the past but he is, as he says at one point, known as "the historical guy". These war stories are his lineage. Désilets talks excitedly of being shut out on the Montreal pavement, and how some of his former co-workers came down to meet him. In the weeks following Désilets' firing, a couple of close allies would join him to found Panache Digital, a studio he named after his own initials. Désilets spent time preparing a legal challenge to regain rights to his big budget project, the now-mothballed 1666. And he began work on another idea, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Now, five years after Ancestors was first announced, Désilets is readying his first game in nearly a decade.
Désilets takes us through Ancestors' opening: an entertaining cut-scene which shows the kinds of awful prehistoric creatures that will happily murder our cuddly ape heroes and chomp them up for lunch. It's 10 million BCE, and evolution has got us to the point where we can swing through the trees and scamper about on all fours. You play as a succession of apes from a tribe with a finite number of individuals. It's your job to stay alive as long as possible to learn new skills, make new ape babies to grow your group's numbers, and survive.
But Ancestors' world can be a punishing place. Whether crawling on the ground or swinging from branches, you're at risk from a range of predators (snakes, crocodiles, wild pigs, evil birds) which can leave you bleeding, poisoned, hobbling around with broken bones or some combination of all three. You'll also have to continually eat, drink and sleep so you don't die some other way instead. Oh and you shouldn't fall from trees - that's bad too.
None of this bothers Désilets, who expertly picks up the controls to play the game proper - we're into a sequence which sees you guide an abandoned baby ape into a hiding place for a grown-up tribe member to find. Once retrieved, the adult heads back to the tribe's base camp for some grooming and one-on-one ape time with a nearby friend, which results in another baby appearing. This, it seems, is Ancestors' main gameplay loop - venture out, complete actions like these, examine objects in the game's world, and you'll sometimes unlock new skills to pass on to your growing tribe. One of the first abilities lets you hold items in both hands, which then allows you to combine materials and craft more complicated things. But, playing all this myself, it felt like there was a lot of trial and error along the way.
Objects of interest are marked in the world if you look around using your "intelligence" sense, a kind of Assassin's Creed-like Eagle Vision which fills your surroundings with markers for you to investigate. Most are for simple crafting materials like branches, or things to eat. Two more senses - smell and hearing - can be toggled between to visualise where predators may be lurking. Food sources must be examined before being consumed for the first time. Water must be tasted, and drunk slowly to avoid poisoning. Sleeping allows you to heal broken bones and poison, but puts you at risk of predators finding you, and leaves you hungry again.
If your ape dies (I was eaten a couple of times, and died from bleeding a couple more) then control will pass to another tribe member, back at base camp. You'll then need to repeat the process of re-finding the baby ape you were carrying, which can often put you back in the same harm's way. If all your tribe are extinguished, you'll need to recruit random outsider apes which may appear on the map. The game's opening area is large enough to get lost in, lush to look at but otherwise featureless. Outside your base camp, steep cliff walls pen you in to the jungle, and straying too far will put your ape into a claustrophobic fear mode.
Ancestors has gone through various changes over the years. Originally devised as an episodic game retelling various sequences of pre-human ape history, its focus was refined to 'just' 10m to 2m years BCE, and reshaped into a single release (although Désilets has already written "volumes two and three" to fill out a potential Ancestors trilogy). Mention of the game having action adventure elements also seems to have been toned down - it's very much a sandboxy survival game now, while the ability to pass on what you have learned to future generations feels almost roguelike.
Later, when I'm done killing off his virtual apes, I ask Désilets about Ancestors' survival elements - and specifically the ability to stop yourself bleeding to death, something most of the dozen or so participants in our play session did not work out through two hours of play, and suffered from as a result. "If I told you the answer right away you'd lose those two hours!" Désilets says. "I'm not saying it's a game of trial and error but through your pains you will learn a little bit. One of the pleasures is to find how you stop bleeding.
"Each time you develop abilities, they're shared with clan," Désilets continues. "When you change generation these are locked but you lose ones you didn't lock - it depends on the numbers of babies you have. Some will be born with special abilities, you have to ensure those reach adulthood. Eventually some missions will help you evolve at a certain pace - and that's how you win against science."
When Ancestors arrives (via digital release sometime in 2019, priced £33/€40/$40) it will be the next step on a journey still at the forefront of Désilets' mind, six years after those events he began today by recalling. Three Ancestors games is "the long-term goal", he tells me. "We hope to spend the next 15 years [making them]. But there's a good chance my next game will be an ape with a cape, in 1666....
Désilets is clearly keen on his new ape protagonists, but I get the feeling he's still desperate to return to that big budget project he was working on, six years ago. "Ancestors is about human evolution but it's about game studio evolution. The first thing we need if we do third-person is the tools and tool box to create something afterwards. I'm thinking long-term with Panache - it's not a one game thing. And now I have a character which can interact with the game world."
"It's there," he says of 1666. "I've designed a bit on the side, but [Ancestors] is the baby. It needs to come out okay." I note that Ancestors is a historical game about climbing and using senses to mark out your surroundings. Despite the species of main character, it's a familiar concept. "I am the designer of Assassin's Creed. And the Prince before," Désilets says. "There's a moment where time passes - and it's a bit like an [Animus] white room. We were doing it and I'm like... [pauses] okay, we'll do it. It's kind of like a signature."
And then we're back to talking about bleeding. "I knew talking to journalists - not in a bad way - but if I tell you the solution I'm removing the real pleasure of the game to your readers. There's a moment of frustration - fuck I'm tired of bleeding."
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-04-12-ancestors-the-humankind-odyssey
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Coming August 27th:
https://gamasutra.com/view/pressrel...ust_27_2019_and_Consoles_in_December_2019.php
What does this say about Outer Worlds release date I wonder.
https://gamasutra.com/view/pressrel...ust_27_2019_and_Consoles_in_December_2019.php
What does this say about Outer Worlds release date I wonder.
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https://www.pcgamer.com/ancestors-is-a-survival-game-set-10000000-years-in-the-past/
Ancestors is a survival game set 10,000,000 years in the past
Play an ape and evolve your way through the primal era.
Ancestors 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.
“It all started from the need to build up a 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’s seemingly opaque on purpose, forcing you to use your primal instincts to figure things out. I like this in theory, but I think it could do with a little more in the way of hints about how exactly things work, just to ease new players in.
Admittedly, when I did figure something out the satisfaction was immense. When I speared my first fish in a river with a pointy stick I felt like the smartest ape alive. And when you achieve something like this, it contributes to your evolution, and you can try and advance to the next evolutionary epoch at any time – although you’ll be held back for any mistakes you make.
I fell off a cliff while trying to scoop honey out of a beehive, and I think that set my evolution back quite a bit.
“It’s all about you, man,” says Désilets. “You decide how you want to evolve and how fast. Ancestors is a game full of systems that talk to each other, and you go and you create your own experiences through those systems. Even if you can see the Matrix like I do when I play every day, unexpected things can still happen. This big ape is inside you. It’s all there!
“Somehow, we are ready to survive in the jungle. It’ll be tough, but it’s in us. In the first prototype the game was more explicit about telling you what to do, but now you have to figure stuff out by yourself. And when you do, it’s an epiphany moment. It really is.
“Our job as game makers is to ensure anything a player thinks, or any idea they come up with, is accommodated by the game. But we’re walking a line. Are we saying too much or too little?
“At this early stage it needs refinement, but it’s a conscious decision for people playing this game to rely on their instinct. Some players probably will bounce off it. But I’m not worried about that. Some people don’t like The Beatles, you know? When it comes to creative projects you can’t please everyone.”
Confound expectations
I ask Désilets if making a unique, slightly bizarre game like this is easier now than it was back when he worked on the first Assassin’s Creed . “I don’t need to sell 25 million copies to make a buck these days,” he says. “That helps! But people tend to forget that the first Assassin’s Creed was pretty out there too. I mean, I made a game about the Crusades, politics, religion, and one that was also set in the future and was a science fiction story. Even with Sands of Time, Ubisoft had us in a small booth to the side at E3. They were like, ‘What the hell is this game?’.
"I’m not a good game designer,” he continues. “I do my thing, and it takes a while for it to make sense. In AC1 you sit on benches and you walk in crowds, man. It’s not a game about running around killing people with hidden blades. There’s some really intense dialogue in there. People tell me it taught them things about life. Last year a game designer told me that Assassin’s Creed inspired him to get into the industry, and he described it as a Trojan horse, and he was totally right.
“You have the word ‘assassin’ in the title, but people forget the ‘creed’ part. Players come in thinking, cool, I’m gonna be an assassin! Then they realise that it’s a bit deeper than that. We trick them. And it’s the same with Ancestors . We’re still those big apes, but now we’re in a controlled environment. Biologically we’re wired to survive a harsh environment, but now that doesn’t really exist. So we invent a harsh environment.”
“There are no leopards running around. But we have anxiety and we have this [points to his stomach] because when we get some sugar, our brain tells us we need more, because you never know when you won’t have it. That’s the primitive brain at work. We don’t have to hunt, we just go to the grocery store, and that’s not good for us, man! It’s not all about these deep themes, though. Playing as an ape is just fun. But they’re there.”
Ancestors isn’t out till next year, and it’s clear it still has a way to go in terms of polish and communicating its systems to the player. There are, at least, some early tutorial missions to illustrate some of the basics, including using your sense to detect smells and sounds. This ability lets you sniff out fellow apes, dangerous animals and landmarks that can be settled. I also found the tree-climbing a little clunky and frustrating, especially when I’d fall to the ground, break my legs, and have to limp around or sleep until they healed. But I can’t fault its imagination, and I’ve never played anything like it before. Désilets is wildly passionate about the project and I think with some refinement, it could be pretty special.
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