Gabriel Stanford-ReisingerLet’s take a trip back to 2014 when Sony teamed up with Wild Sheep Studio to start development of a PlayStation exclusive IP; WiLD. Said game has never seen the light of day following various complications and has exited active development.
Former PlayStation exec, Shuhei Yoshida, has come forward to give his explanation why WiLD was canned in an interview with with MinnMax. In the end, it all basically boils down to their eyes being bigger than their stomach in terms of ideas. While the vision was great, the studio itself never managed to materialize the ideas into the game, leading to the PS4 exclusive getting canned.
“We were working with Michel Ancel’s team, [Wild Sheep Studio], on a project called WiLD. 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 materialise into the game structure. It was very open kind of thinking […] One of the earliest [pitches] was the map size of the game was the size of Europe.”
There’s really two sides here and you kinda have to question who is more on the nose; on one hand, you have the game potentially failing due to the handling of Ubisoft, which was handed publishing rights, but on the other hand here, Yoshida seems to veil a level of the studio not being able to live up to their lofty goals of huge map sizes and ambition.
What do you think? Was WiLD an issue of over-ambitious ideas or a wider issue surrounding mid-development publisher changes? Let us know below!
