PS4 Exclusive Wild’s Cancellation Finally Addressed

Rumors of Ubisoft‘s PS4 exclusive Wild (sytlized WiLD) getting canceled began in 2021. Roughly three years later, Wild Sheep Studio creative director Steven ter Heide confirmed the seemingly ambitious game was no longer in active development. The game’s original director Michel Ancel claimed the cancellation was due to Ubisoft’s mismanagement. However, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida shed some more light on the situation.

Former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida explains Wild’s cancellation

In an interview with MinnMax (via Push Square), Yoshida shared his thoughts on Wild Sheep Studio’s development of Wild. The former PlayStation exec remarks that the game’s vision was “amazing,” but it didn’t end up culminating into a finished product, and inevitably was canceled.

“We were working with Michel Ancel’s team, [Wild Sheep Studio], on a project called Wild,” Yoshida says. “That vision was amazing. So we worked with them for a long time […] but in the end, we had to cancel it.”

“There [were] lots of great ideas [that] didn’t really materialize into the game structure,” Yoshida continues. “It was very open kind of thinking […] One of the earliest [pitches] was the map size of the game was the size of Europe.”

Ancel recalled Wild’s tumultuous production in an interview in December last year. He claims the game had an “unfortunate fate,”

“Wild had an unfortunate fate,” Ancel recalled. “In 2018, we had a very nice playable version, but we took a long time to upgrade the game to PS5, which slowed down production. On Sony’s side, there were major management changes and the game was stopped.”

Ubisoft eventually took the project over which is the period where Ancel began to burn out. Wild would be helmed by Ubisoft Paris, which the former director says was “in chaos.” He claimed the publisher’s management of Wild was a “real scandal.”

“I was no longer there to defend the game, which was literally crushed by people in this department who were asking for all sorts of changes without actually playing the game,” said Ancel. “A real scandal. After two years of wandering, the game was abandoned on the pretext that it no longer corresponded to the initial game.”

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