Skip ahead to about the 9:30 mark to see a playthrough of Ancestors’ opening minutes.

The game is unusual. It has characters who don’t speak, though they can communicate in some ways. Désilets says there are a variation of the kind of squad commands you might find in a covert ops game. The characters wear no clothes (there’s a “lot of fur” which helps them achieve an acceptable game rating). There’s no single lead character, no individual hero’s tale.

Advertisement

Even the aforementioned controls sound distinct, not just because he’s doing another experimental button scheme, but because he’s decided to trigger actions at the moment a button is released rather than when it is pressed. “That’s how we do it in real life,” he said. We think, then we act. Well, sometimes.

Désilets did not bring a playable build of the game with him to E3, saying it would have been too taxing for his small team to create a demo for the show as they race to finish the game for a late August PC release (it’s not slated for consoles until December). This was both understandable and worrisome, for anyone, myself included, eager to know if Désilets still has it.

Advertisement

Back in 2003, Sand of Time was a revelation, mixing exhilarating running and jumping with a game-long dialogue-driven love story and spicing it up with the ability to rewind failed jumps and try them again.

When Désilets was tasked with cooking up a Sand of Time sequel for the dawn of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation, he concocted Assassin’s Creed, a game about a man in modern times using a device to relive the lives of his assassin ancestors, first as a 12th century Syrian during the Crusades and then as an Italian during the Renaissance. The controls for those early Assassin’s Creed games were based on the idea of puppetry: top button for the head, middle buttons for the arms, lowest button for the legs.

Advertisement

He says he got tired of making Assassin’s Creed games and left publisher Ubisoft after the third one, Brotherhood. That concluded a decade of productivity and hits, followed by a decade of no released games. He tried making a new one at THQ before the studio collapsed and Ubisoft brought him back, only for him to leave again. At E3 in 2015 he started talking to me about his small new studio, Panache, and his idea for Ancestors: “Assassin’s Creed meets the Civilization tech tree.” The game would be episodic (it no longer is) and surely out sooner than 2019.

Désilets did not bring his team’s game to his E3 interviews, but he did bring a picture of the three dozen people making the game at his studio, Panache. That’s unusual. Why’d he do it? “I’m fucking proud of those people,” he said. “Have you seen what they’re doing? They’re 35. Not 800. Thirty-five dedicated people to making something unique.”
Désilets did not bring his team’s game to his E3 interviews, but he did bring a picture of the three dozen people making the game at his studio, Panache. That’s unusual. Why’d he do it? “I’m fucking proud of those people,” he said. “Have you seen what they’re doing? They’re 35. Not 800. Thirty-five dedicated people to making something unique.”
Advertisement

Tossed a softball about whether the game is really going to be fun enough, he snarks: “No it’s really boring.”

He swears he’s never made a game he’s had this much fun playing and promises that, no, he’s not just saying that because he is currently making this one: “It’s the game I play the most in all my career. You like the Prince, you like Assassin’s. Me, I was fucking bored at the end of playing that game.” He tells the story of playing it recently, of being an elder protecting two babies during a rainstorm, trying to keep them alive to make humanity possible. He gets dreamy about it, wistful that he’s not playing as we speak. “I need my fix. It’s been a week now. I need to go back home and eventually get myself lost in the savannah with my crew and go kill a fucking leopard.”