Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Why Patrice Désilets’ epic journey is no ordinary survival game
PC, PS4, Xbox One
For a man known for historical adventures, Patrice Désilets has spent a while trying to escape his past. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is his first game since 2010’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, after which he left Ubisoft to pursue new creative horizons. That didn’t quite pan out. After two years working on 1666 Amsterdam for THQ Montreal, Désilets’ new publisher went bust, and the studio was sold – to Ubisoft. Time for another fresh start. “What I needed was a game that could serve as a toolbox for many other IPs,” he tells us. He built a simple, flexible template for a thirdperson action game with no setting, purely to show off “cool gameplay mechanics”.
When he started to pitch it, he got a predictable response. “People said, ‘Yeah, but where’s Assassin’s Creed? Where is your historical game? That’s your signature, and we’d give you money if you had one,’” he says. ‘You want historical,’ Désilets thought, ‘I’ll give you historical.’ “I had a flash about prehistoric times: I don’t have to build a civilisation, I don’t have to build a city. I can just focus on this main character in a 3D environment. And so that was the beginning of it all.”
No kidding. Ancestors starts 10 million years ago, and by its end 8 million years will have elapsed – fortunately not in realtime (this really isn’t another Assassin’s Creed). In between you control a tribe of early men and women as they chart a huge open world, taking in jungles, forests and savannahs, as they steadily expand their territory and their clan, before eventually evolving. “Character progression in an action-adventure game is basically the same thing as human evolution,” Désilets says. ‘Basically’ is doing a lot of work there, but we see his point: Ancestors will adopt a more organic approach to levelling up.
This, you see, is no ordinary survival game. “It’s not about going in to your inventory and combining two elements to create a third one,” he says, and we want to cheer. And then suddenly we’re confused: “Don’t forget that not only is this open-world survival, but you play as Mario.” Happily, he elaborates. “How the main character moves and how he behaves, that second-to-second gameplay is really important. That itself is very different to any other survival game.”
In the game’s main survival mode, you won’t know where your adventure begins. Désilets likens it to starting a new map on Civilization. “Depending on where you start your life – I won’t say it’ll be easier or harder, but it will change the pacing of it. Since there’s no map it’ll take a while for you to [divine] ‘Okay, where am I exactly?’ There’s a lot of randomisation. You may start alone and injured in the middle of a chase sequence.”
With no minimap, you’ll need to use your senses to navigate. But since you set your own goals, you can’t blame the game if you lose your way. “We did a playtest a couple of weeks ago and somebody said – and I feel like he got it – ‘I got lost, but I felt it was my fault’. And that’s…” he stops talking, but shakes his fist triumphantly.
That’s the essence of Ancestors, essentially: it’s a game where you need to keep your wits about you, because the game won’t do it for you. But if predators and other natural hazards make it a perilous journey, dying simply means control will pass to another member of your clan, giving you more leeway to fail than you ordinarily get in the genre. It’s about sensation, not challenge. “It’s the perfect game to play on a rainy Friday night because then you’re suddenly in Africa 10 million years ago,” he says. In other words, Désilets has emerged from his own personal wilderness to give us an escape into another. It’s good to have him back.
“Character progression in a game is basically the same thing as human evolution”