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How Patrice Desilets made Ancestors, his first game in ten years
After playing with the biggest of the big, Patrice Desilets is back with an indie studio. We spoke to him about Ancestors, Panache Digital Games’ first title.
A decade is a long time in anyone’s book, and especially so in gaming. Patrice Desilets can attest to this. The director on Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, as well as the first two instalments in the monstrously successful Assassin’s Creed series, Desilets seemingly left the industry for ten years. Not in hiding, he’s keen to stress – but a victim of the ups-and-downs of the gaming industry.
Now, ten years after leaving Ubisoft, he’s back with a new studio, a new team, and crucially, an exciting, interesting new game: Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. We caught up with Desilets to talk about that game, what it’s like being indie, and what he’s been up to since we last got to play one of his games.
“It's not like I was hidden somewhere in a cave”, Desilets tells us. His focus right now is to make sure as many people as possible know about Ancestors, Panache’s debut title. “It means a lot: it's kind of like our first baby,'' he explains, “So it's really something special and unique for us. And personally, it's been ten years since I've shipped a game. I've made some games, but I didn't ship them, so it's really important and a bit stressful to be honest.”
The distinction between shipping and making a game is important here. He’s been busy, and it turns out he didn’t really even take much time off after leaving Ubisoft. “I quit Ubisoft in 2010 and then I joined THQ, that's why I didn't ship,” he explains. So after leaving a huge company, to join a huge company (THQ), he was befallen by spectacular bad luck: THQ went bankrupt in 2012 leaving Desilets unable to put out his work.
“The THQ adventure, for me, lasted five years because after it went bankrupt, got bought by back by Ubisoft, and something went down,” Desilets explains, “and I started Panache in 2014, and so here we are, four years later with a game that’s about to ship”.
Climbing through the trees never looked so good
© Panache Digital Games
Burning Desires
It must be a curious thing to be a creative game designer, working for some of the biggest companies around, only to suddenly be independent. We were curious if Patrice was fed up with the situation, having decided to form his own studio to be in complete control. “It's not about control,” he insists, “I felt like it was my time to do it. I had enough experience, I was old enough, and then the bad luck (with previous jobs) was like a push forward.” Again, the positivity shines through as Desilets tells us, “The glass is full – not even half, it's always full”.
So Panache’s first game, Ancestors, then. Patrice Desilets is a name the game playing public are aware of; Assassin’s Creed II made sure of that. But with that name comes some weight. Ancestors wasn’t a burning desire, and the pressure helped the idea come to fruition. “It's like people told me: you're the Assassin's Creed dude, you're the historical game designer, so where is it?” Desilets explains, “Then I had a flash about making a prehistoric game, then I can focus on what I need to build first, which is a third-person character with a 3D world.”
Panache is a small studio, though. Starting out with seven people in July 2015, there are now 35 people working there. With a smaller team, you’d expect constraints, but the idea of Ancestors works well for the team. “Because prehistoric time means there's not a lot of technology to build, it's just about the environment and the characters and this is how it all started,” Desilets explains. “We are coming from tribes wandering around the planet with nothing, and surviving together,” he goes on, “let's start at the very beginning and let people play the fantasy of us descending the trees and walking on two legs – let's do it!”
Small seeds, big trees
Originally, Ancestors was going to be episodic, but very quickly Desilets and the team decided to change this. “There would be a lot of episodes of how we got here and now,” he says, ”then eventually, we said forget about business models and let's build a real game. Then it was more about the science of it all at first, really trying to tell the key moments of human evolution,” he continues, “but it was a bit boring so we built a bigger open world and we took all the science we were studying into a game world and then forgot about it, so that the player can be the co-creator of this evolution.”
But going from development studios that were 800 people large, to 35 is a big change. Desilets, however, has worked in smaller teams before. “Well, Assassin’s Creed we were 200, then Assassin’s Creed II was 800, so with Ancestors it’s like going back to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, where we were like 40-ish.”
It seems Desilets is a fan of a smaller team, though. “With Sands of Time, I remember everyone was doing something,” he says. “It's going back to this idea that we all do the game together. When you have a big team everybody's doing a game, but it's not like our game. There was some people on Assassin's that I didn't know, and they would come by my desk asking me for a decision and I'd introduce myself and ask who they were. Here, everyone knows me, and we're all making Ancestors.”
Under pressure
Swapping a behemoth publisher like Ubisoft for his own studio means different pressures, though. Instead of a boss above that wants a brilliant game, now he knows everyone again, and the pressure comes from within the studio. “Everybody wants to do the best they can with the time we have. We support each other and, yes, it doesn't come from above,” Desilets explains.
But it’s hard to balance, he admits: “I am the above, but I try to not be the guy from above. I'm the vision guy, I design mostly, I am also the guy who plays the game all the time saying this works, this doesn't, could we do this, or remove that? I'm trying to edit the game so it fits the time, quality and budget, but I'm always playing the game.”
For a 35-strong team, Ancestors is a big deal, and a big game that can take 50 hours to play through, but Desilets is insistent that the team do not burn out. “Nobody has slept in the office yet!” he jokes. “Even in May I said before we ship everyone must take at least a week of vacation, because the week after we ship we have to continue, so it wouldn't make sense that we burn ourselves.”
Desilets is acutely aware that Ancestors will be judged against his previous work, too. “I wake up way too early, but at the same time I put that pressure on myself,” he says, “at the same time I'm a dad and my real life is not only about shipping games and the pressure of it all. Yes it's important but it's also just a video game, but it's a video game about a really important subject matter done by a small clan of 35 somewhere in Montreal.”
A time without computers, just animals
© Panache Digital Games
Bold choices
With Ancestors, like his previously designed games, Desilets wants to shine a light on the characters, but there’s more to it than that, he tells us. “I feel these days in general, there's rules of what is a video game and then you attach a subject matter on top of it: you don't really care,” he says, “so I feel a lot of the games are the same, and for me it's about my subject matter and I'll try to build a game.”
He wanted to put the subject matter at the forefront, then build the game. For instance, while Ancestors has a user interface, it’s minimal compared to some modern games:
“In the subject matter of us evolving on this planet there was no UI; there was no map – we were all alone and we didn't know if the thing that came up in the morning that gave us light would come back the next day and we were really afraid, because everything wants us dead: so how do I make a game about that?
“So we've removed a bunch of help you would find in other games because it's about the subject matter and I want you, the player, to be immersed into that universe.”
Poetry in design
What the future holds for Panache and Ancestors, we don’t yet know. But what we do know is that his positivity deserves reward, and that this is a big game made by a small studio. “I played and then I tell my guys we're crazy, it's big for 35 people,” Desilets remarks. “I like poetry in game design, not saying everything and playing with archetypes and this particular project I realised the real beauty of the freedom of choice, of letting the player finish what we started.”
There are no current plans to bring the game to Switch, but it’s not off the table. After putting the PC version out, work continues on the console version, currently set to be released at the end of 2019. Desilets is immensely proud of the game, and his team. “You load at the beginning and then that's it, you're in Africa ten million years ago for 30-50 hours, and I'm really proud of my team for that.”
He concludes: “It's a real open game: you're there, and it works.”
