Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Why Patrice Désilets’ epic journey is no ordinary survival game.

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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 third-person 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.