Ancestors The Humankind Odyssey 
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Patrice D silets insists Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey didn't review well because critics "didn't play the game"Dec 1, 2019 - EurogamerFormer Assassin's Creed developer Patrice D silets has hit out at reviewers of his new game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, insisting some critics "didn't play the game" because of the game's mediocre aggregate score on Metacritic. "I'm used to having bigger numbers than that, so it's the elephant in the room," D silets told attendees of Reboot Develop Red (thanks, GI.biz), referring to the typical higher scores achieved by Assassin's Creed games. "But people expected my studio of 35 people to ship a game that is really close to Assassin's Creed, and it's just not possible. We made some harsh decisions in order to ship the game, and we wanted it to be different. "We know for a fact that some reviewers actually didn't play the game," he added. "It is part of our industry - they have to review games, and they have 15 of them to review in one week, and sometimes they don't have time. And since Ancestors is so different, some of them went 'urgh, I don't have time for this'." Read more It sounds like 1666: Amsterdam will be the game Patrice D silets makes nextOct 30, 2019 - EurogamerPatrice D silets has given a strong indication that 1666: Amsterdam will be Panache Digital's next game, following the release of Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey earlier this year. D silets mentioned 1666: Amsterdam towards the end of an Ancestors postmortem at Reboot Develop Red in Canada today, while talking about what could come next. I was in the audience so I pressed him. "How serious are you about revisiting 1666?" I asked because sometimes it's hard to tell. Read more Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey review - broken bones and giant leapsAug 27, 2019 - EurogamerI was on the bus the other day when I realised that Ancestors was probably starting to get to me. I found myself thinking about haircuts. About hairstyles. Looking at all the different ways of dealing with hair that were evident around me. Why do we do this? I wondered. The fringe, the pony, the pompadour. Why do we do this with our fur? Fur? Every now and then, just to freak myself out, I try to remember that I'm a great ape. I haven't evolved from an ape, I don't share a common ancestor with an ape, I am one. My hands are ape hands. My feet are ape feet. Making a sandwich, using a stapler, worrying about the season finale for Million Dollar Listing: NYC? All of these are ape behaviours. And now here's Ancestors to remind me afresh. Ancestors - its full name is Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, just in case you weren't already thinking about the first act of 2001 quite enough - is an attempt, I think, to make a game of something like Yuval Harari's book Sapiens. How did modern humans get going? Let's see! Meet a group of hominids, living their lives millions of years ago. They're out there deep in the wilds somewhere. Can you lead them on a journey across hundreds of generations and put them on the path towards becoming something like us? Can you take them from fur to the side-parting, to the meet-me-at-McDonalds? Read more Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey reviewAug 26, 2019 - PC GamerThe aroused moaning of the prehistoric ape I'm trying to bang is getting to be a bit much. She's really into this backrub I'm giving her, but I'm having trouble feeling the mood myself. We're squatting in the freezing rain, my leg is broken, I have an orphaned toddler clinging to my back, and another member of my clan is enthusiastically picking his nose in my sightline. It's not even a tiny bit romantic, but hey—I'm trying to save our species. Listening to an ape get horny as I rub her hairy back isn't the only thing I'm not keen on in third-person survival game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. It begins 10 million years in the past with you controlling the leader of a small clan of hominids—the distant precursors to human beings that eventually evolved, invented computers, developed games about ancient hominids, and wrote reviews about them. And like evolution itself, Ancestors is slow, often uneventful, and a frequently frustrating struggle. Ape escapism An average day in Ancestors is spent exploring the forests, swamps, and savannas of Africa, using your senses to examine your surroundings. But the novelty of detecting something by sound or scent wears off almost immediately due to repetition and awkward controls. When I want to use my senses to investigate something, I need to stop moving completely. Then I need to make sure I'm not close to any rock, stick, plant, or food item or I'll get the prompt to interact with that item instead of the prompts to use my senses. So there's a lot of moving and stopping, then shuffling around because I stopped too close to something else. It's awkward instead of instinctive, which isn't great for a game about being a creature of instinct. Even just trying to target another hominid for an interaction is a fiddly annoyance, like the endless backrubs I need to perform in hopes of convincing one to mate with me. There's naturally lots of climbing and jumping around on the cliffs and trees, which can be exhilarating when making long leaps to snag vines and branches, but much less fun when you miss. There's no targeting here—it's a leap of faith that you'll connect with the spot you're aiming for, and most expeditions wind up with me plummeting to the ground at least once and shattering my leg. The finer movements of my hominid are even more difficult, like trying to transition from a vertical tree trunk to a horizontal branch, which takes a lot of slow maneuvering, re-adjusting, and accidentally climbing up when I mean to climb down. Discovery activates your ape's neurons and unlocks new skills, but progress is achingly slow Discovery itself, though, can be satisfying. Early on I found another hominid, a stranger to my clan, up in a tree, holding his wrist as if in pain. Having broken my leg a half-dozen times by this point, I knew there was a type of plant that provided a buff for bone strength...Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey shows off its evolution systemAug 16, 2019 - PC GamerAncestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a generational survival sim, so while you're making sure your chimps are learning new skills that will help them fend off predators and find food, you'll also be ensuring that the next generation starts off with more advantages. The final video in the 101 series digs into the RPG-like evolutionary system, which starts with individual chimp learning. You'll be able to make discoveries while controlling individual chimps, like figuring out that a rock can be used as a very simple tool, which will then unlock neurons in the development menu, as well as the abilities that come with them. Ancestors takes place over millions of years, so expect some big leaps in time. You'll be able to make smaller generational jumps, too, where infants will become adults, adults will become elders and the things you learned in the previous generation will be passed onto the next, benefiting the whole tribe. I like the sound of the learning-by-doing system, especially since it's more about discovery than repeating the same task over and over again until you get better. It's playing very fast and loose with evolution, but it gives some context to the upgrades your tribe gets instead of just doling out arbitrary improvements when you level up. The skills we've seen so far are pretty basic, but I'm hoping I'll be able to use it to instil only the best qualities in my chimp pals, like being good at maths or having excellent comedic timing. There's more to life than crafting really sharp spears and smashing rocks together. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is due out on August 27 on the Epic Games Store, and elsewhere next year. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey heads to the savanna at the PC Gaming ShowJun 10, 2019 - PC GamerAssassin's Creed creator Patrice Désilets' new project is a novel survival game set ten million years ago. You play an ape trying to find food and live a dignified life in a world that really wants to eat it. Andy was impressed by the ambition of the game when he went to see it a few weeks ago. Back then all we saw was a lot of jungle, but at the PC Gaming Show today the team showed off a new savanna location. You can evolve your ape as you play through the game, and adaptation is an important theme. To create a more authentic survival experience the game deliberately cuts back on tutorials. You have to learn to fish and steal honey from beehives all by yourself. In a segment supported by PC Gaming Show sponsor Epic Games, the team goes into greater detail on the evolution systems that serve as RPG elements. Once you've learned how to survive solo you can grow a clan, support new generations, and evolve over the course of eight million years (hopefully with some time skips). The game is due out on August 27 this year. Find out more on the official site. Ancestors is a survival game set 10,000,000 years in the pastJun 4, 2019 - PC GamerAncestors 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. Thatȁ...Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey PS4, Xbox One editions launch four months after PCMay 23, 2019 - EurogamerPrehistoric ape evolution game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey now has a firm release date for PC via the Epic Games Store, and a later launch window for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. On PC, Ancestors will arrive 27th August. It's exclusive to Epic Games Store for a full year. On console, Ancestors will launch digitally sometime this December, around four months later. There's a line in the press release about developer Panache wanting to release the game on each platform only when it's ready, though no specifics on why there's a hold up for consoles. Ancestors is the first game in a decade from Patrice Desilets, one of the original creators behind Assassin's Creed, now perhaps better known for his subsequent firing from the company. It's primarily a survival game, with roguelike elements that allow you to pass on learned skills to later generations, in levels across thousands of years. Read more Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is coming in AugustMay 23, 2019 - PC GamerAncestors: The Humankind Odyssey will take us back to the days of monkeying around and fighting saber-toothed tigers via the Epic Games Store this August. To help prepare you for the hefty responsibility of leading your hairy clan across millions of years, developer Panache has put together a video explaining how you can survive and expand. While you take control of one character, including adults and infants, you're also responsible for the health of the clan. You have to fight off predators, find food, help your buddies when they're sick and eventually expand the clan. Having kids passes on the things you've learned, eventually allowing your clan to evolve, and new characters can be recruited. One thing holding you back is your fear. If you're an infant separated from the clan, or even an adult exploring new territory, you'll be assaulted by your own instincts, imagining all the terrible things lurking in the jungle. You can push through it, however, and as you explore an area you can conquer your fear, letting you expand your territory. Andy Kelly stumbled around the jungle in April, so give his Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey hands-on a read. It's a bit opaque, he said, but that also makes discoveries more rewarding. "When I did figure something out myself, the satisfaction was pretty immense. When I speared my first fish in a river with a pointy stick I felt like the smartest ape who ever lived. And when you achieve something like this, it contributes to your evolution via a scoring system, 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." Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is due out on August 27 on the Epic Games Store, and elsewhere a year later. As expected, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a year-long Epic Store exclusiveMay 13, 2019 - PC GamerTake-Two Interactive announced today that Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, the promising prehistoric survival game being developed by Patrice Désilets' Panache Digital Games studio, will be available exclusively through the Epic Games Store for a year. Ancestors is being published by Take-Two's Private Division label, as is The Outer Worlds, also a timed Epic exclusive (not counting the Microsoft Store). Interestingly, while Take-Two has favored the Epic Store with recent releases—Borderlands 3 will also be exclusive—the studio said in an earnings call today that these timed exclusives will be "rare." "In terms of supporting the Epic Games Store, we think more distribution is a good thing," Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick said during today's earnings call. "And while it's rare that we'll do exclusives for any period of time—we continue to support Steam with our titles, our catalog—and these titles will be going to Steam relatively quickly after their initial availability on the Epic Games Store." The Borderlands 3 exclusivity period is different from Ancestors and The Outer Worlds. Borderlands 3 will come to "additional PC digital storefronts"—not necessarily Steam, but that's the assumption—in April 2020, in the neighborhood of seven months after its September 13 release on Epic. Despite the Epic Store exclusivity, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey remains listed on Steam, and looks like it will stay there. The Steam page says it "will be available on Steam one year after launch on other exclusive digital PC platforms." Surviving in the wild: Assassin's Creed maker Patrice D silets on Ancestors, his first game in nearly a decadeApr 12, 2019 - EurogamerFew 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 D silets getting the boot from Ubisoft, six years ago. Relieved of his services mere months after rejoining the company, D silets 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 D silets introduces himself and his new game via a potted history of past escapades. I hadn't expected D silets 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. D silets 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 D silets' firing, a couple of close allies would join him to found Panache Digital, a studio he named after his own initials. D silets 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, D silets is readying his first game in nearly a decade. D silets 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. Read more Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a fascinating prehistoric survival gameApr 12, 2019 - PC GamerAncestors 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 stretching into the jungle canopy. "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. "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 tells me, 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." 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 build a place to sleep. As you play, neurons 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, rocks, and plants. 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 Strauss playing. It felt great. Neurons are fired in your ape's brain, which acts like an upgrade tree "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, even as modern humans, so why not ...Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey shows off its player-driven explorationApr 4, 2019 - PC GamerThere are no maps or things pushing you to complete missions or objectives in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, according to creative director Patrice Désilets. In a new video, he breaks down what our hirsute ancestors need to do to survive as they start their long march through evolution. Familiar survival demands require your attention, like sleeping and eating, but players are otherwise free to explore the world with their ape, from the ground or the tree tops. There will no doubt be lots of climbing, as one would hope from the creator of Assassin's Creed. Going for a wee wander or a quick snack isn't without its dangers, unfortunately. You might come across something nasty out for a slither, or some other predator looking for a tasty ape. Luckily, you can engineer a fight between them, slipping away when they're busy trying to kill each other. Even if you avoid all the other beasties, however, you might just end up getting food poisoning from a dodgy egg. It sounds like the only set goal is surviving and passing on that experience to the next generation. Eventually, millions of years down the line, you'll have a structured tribe that can make tools and conquer territory. You'll even be able to beat up a saber-toothed cat. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is due out this year, and keep an eye out for more videos soon. Assassin's Creed creator's survival game Ancestors is out in 2019Dec 7, 2018 - PC GamerAncestors: The Humankind Odyssey flings us back 10 million years to the origins of humanity. Announced a few years ago by Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Désilets and his team as Panache Digital Games, we’re only now getting a look at it in action. The trailer shows off four phases of our ancestors’ development. In the first part, ten million years ago, there’s a single ape swinging through the trees before getting devoured by a snake. A couple of million years later, a group of apes are being chased by a crocodile, but they make it to the trees in time and escape. We jump forward to four million years ago to see an ape with a baby on its back using a primitive weapon to kill boars. Finally, just shy of three million years ago, a band of hunters encounter and kill a huge saber-toothed cat. Nice job. It’s an open-world survival that unfurls as our ancestors evolve, gaining new physical skills and tools. Knowledge can be passed down through the generations, and you can choose what attributes the species keeps. You get to decide how they evolve intellectually and physically, making specialised survivors or a balanced tribe. The tribe can also grow and swallow up territory, while new members can be controlled and form familial bonds. Check out the new Steam page. Ancestors is due out next year. Patrice Desilets' ape evolution game Ancestors will be out in 2019Dec 6, 2018 - EurogamerApe evolution action-adventure game Ancestors: A Humankind Odyssey will be released in 2019. This is the game former Assassin's Creed creative director Patrice Desilets has been making with his 30-person studio Panache Digital in Canada for the past few years. Desilets unveiled fresh footage of Ancestors during The Game Awards tonight, showing four clips from different evolutionary periods, each millions of years apart. Read more…
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