WiLD: Technology & People behind an Environmental Adventure

WiLD is a new project by famous French game designer Michel Ancel. The creator of Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil is building an impressive environmental open world game, where you play as an animal-loving shaman. He travels around the vast terrains, charms snakes, eagles and rides huge bears. The whole game runs exclusively on PlayStation 4 and features some amazing technical stuff.

In the most recent trailer Michel talked a little bit about the production of this title.

One of the tasks of the game developers was to create an incredibly vast open world. The game’s technical dicrector Christophe de Labrouhe says that there are really no restrictions in WiLD, you can go “anywhere any when”. Christophe, just like, Michel, had a nice career at Ubisoft. He worked on AI and was a gameplay programmer un Ubisoft during 2008 – 2011. One of the games he worked on is From DUST, where he got quite a lot of praise from the colleagues.

Christophe is incredibly good for prototyping gameplay and he is also someone very creative. For me he’s the most important person for “Project Dust” gameplay and we could not make that game without him.

Benoît Vimont, Senior 3D programmer at Ubisoft

It leads us to believe that WiLD is in good hands and we’re going to see some very interesting technical decisions from this company and Christophe de Labrouhe. We just don’t know what kind of engine do the developers use? If you have some guesses, please share in the comments.

WiLD © Wild Sheep Studio, Sony Computer Entertainment, 2015

To achieve the necessary depth and belivability, Michel Ancel asked the team members to go into the wild and have some sort of survival experience to really fell the wild world. The developers did into a lot of very interesting wild places all over the world and gathered a lot of real materials in 3d form.

WiLD © Wild Sheep Studio, Sony Computer Entertainment, 2015

The game’s art director Celine Tellier (who’s also the CEO of Wild Sheep and former Ubisoft 3d artist with 17 years of experience) asked the devs to bring lots of stuff from the journeys. As you can see from the trailer, the whole office of the company is filled with bones, skulls, branches, stones and other pieces of nature. All these pieces were carefully scanned by the team and transferred into the game. The developers used photogrammetry to copy the real assets in 3d. Michel is incredibly happy about the usage of such real assets in the game.

The WiLD’s lead game designer is Swann Martin-Raget. Swann is one of the guys behind ZombiU, From Dust. He was also a designer at Tearaway during his 1,5 years in Media Molecule. Let’s hope he can bring some of his imagination into this new game and build a really interesting sandbox experience.

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So far WiLD looks like a very interesting project. Although the demo shown in Paris felt a little bit empty, there’s no denying that the world looks amazing and the way you can interact with animals opens a whole range of various possibilities for building interesting gameplay.

Kirill Tokarev, 80.lv