Ancestors "not a triple-A game, it's a triple-I"

At E3 this year we got to sit down and talk with veteran developer Patrice Désilets about his new game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, and while we were talking we got an insight into how he positions this game and the work Panache Digital Games is doing.

"I'm really proud of what we could do with that small team of 35," he explained. "We cannot do everything that you see in a triple-A game. It's not a triple-A game, it's a triple-I - it's a nice, independent game."

Since Désilets is known - among other things - for leading the Assassin's Creed franchise, we also asked about how this experience has helped him at Panache, and he explained that traversal is a big thing.

"I've been doing the same game over and over again - I do games about a character that jumps around with sword, so everything that has to do with that, I know how. So even the lead animator on our project, Alex, he's the one who animated the Prince, he's the one who animated Altair and Ezio, and now he's animating those characters, so that's pretty neat, right? We've been working together for the last, almost 20 years now, so that was easy. But then the way I work is I study this subject matter and then I'm like 'this is what I wanna create'. I'm not very good at creating video games; I'm good at creating a thing about a subject," he said.

"We don't have a 'combat system', it's more like... we call it the kill system which is either you get killed or you kill, but eventually there is a loop in which you can kind of create a combat scene - it's the way you want to play it, basically."

We also ended the interview by asking about how he feels about the evolution of the Assassin's Creed franchise since he left the series, to which he gave the brief response:

"I cannot talk about the other Assassin's Creed games because I didn't play them."

Can you see the influence of Assassin's Creed in Ancestors?