Plenty of video games end up in production and just can’t get through to the finish line. Unfortunately, we will never hear about some of these projects, while others will be very public. For instance, one game that had a lot of hype behind it but was ultimately killed off was WiLD. During a recent podcast interview, Shuhei Yoshida thinks back to his time working with the teams to help bring this game out.
If you don’t recall WiLD, the game was first introduced to the world back in 2014. So, it was quite some time ago that Michel Ancel revealed the game with his team, Wild Sheep Studio. Sony would be publishing this game, and it was meant to be a grand survival experience. Set in a prehistoric era, players would have this massive procedurally generated world where the focus would be using shamanic powers to explore and deal with conflicts.
Players could easily take control of any wild creature as they traveled the world, whether wolves, birds, fish, or insects. The game showed some real promise back in the day, but over the years, it eventually missed the planned release on the PlayStation 4. There were even efforts to bring the game to the PlayStation 5.
Shuhei Yoshida was the president of SIE Worldwide Studios for Sony Interactive Entertainment at the time. Of course, he has since retired and is spending some time looking back at the decades of time he put into Sony PlayStation. During a recent interview on MinnMax, Shuhei Yoshida brought up WiLD.
When asked about why the game was cancelled, Yoshida noted that there were a lot of incredible ideas. However, most never really materialized into the game structure. One of these was just the size of the game, which would feature a map that would be roughly the size of Europe.
That game would eventually see its official cancellation in 2024, a few years after Michel Ancel left the game industry altogether. Still, it was one project that Yoshida was excited about, and he tried his best to see it come out.