Almost seven years after it was first announced, PlayStation exclusive Wild has reportedly been cancelled. We haven’t heard much about the game since it’s launch trailer at Gamescom 2014 and the gameplay trailer at Paris Games Week 2015, but according to industry reporter Jeff Grubb, Wild Sheep Studio has cancelled the project.
“I can confirm that game is fully done. There is no Wild anymore. Wild is dead,” he said on Giant Bomb’s Grubbsnax show. “I think Michel Ancel abandoned the project… he’s not working on it anymore, the project got shut down. The team that was working on it was looking at maybe trying to stay together and work on other projects. I don’t know what happened with that, but they were like, ‘we’re not working on [Wild] anymore, but we do have a lot of talent here, so maybe we can work on some stuff’.”
From what we could gather via the trailers, Wild was supposed to be an open world action adventure game set in a prehistoric era. The protagonist had the ability to commune with various animals and even control them in order to perform various tasks.
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“Wild is an action adventure game about the relationship between man and nature,” said creative director Michel Ancel during the game’s PGW showcase. “We want the player to experience things, to learn how the wild world works.”
Incidentally, Ancel retired from the video game industry in September 2020. He mentioned that he was leaving the industry to pursue his passion for nature. “After more than 30 years, I’ve decided to stop working on video games and fully focus on my second passion : Wild Life !” he said in a statement at that time. “My new project takes place in the real world and consists in a wild life open sanctuary dedicated to education , nature lovers and … wild animals.”
The reports of Wild’s cancellation come as a surprise as only last month we reported that a number of job listings at the studio suggested that the project was still in the works. It’s not clear what could have happened over the last month, but if Grubb is to be believed, the game stands cancelled.
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