PlayStation Exclusive Game No Longer in Active Development

Wild is no longer in development, a senior Wild Sheep Studio official has confirmed. The PlayStation-exclusive game is estimated to have been in the works for over half a decade.

Wild Sheep Studio was founded in 2014 by legendary video game designer Michel Ancel, best known as the creator of Rayman and Beyond Good and Evil. The company then took to Gamescom 2014 to announce its first-ever project, an ambitious survival game called Wild. While the studio shared a few more updates in the coming years, the infrequent rate of its communications eventually made many an industry watcher argue that Wild was unlikely to ever come out.

Wild Sheep Studio No Longer Working on Wild

That speculation has now been confirmed by Wild Sheep Studio Creative Director Steven ter Heide. Responding to a recent fan question on Twitter, ter Heide revealed that Wild is no longer in active development. The studio official did not clarify when exactly Wild Sheep scrapped the game. But the project's abandonment is ostensibly not a new development, as industry insider Jeff Grubb previously reported that Wild was canceled no later than 2021.

Specifically, the Montpellier, France-based developer is said to have ceased all work on the game not long after Michel Ancel retired from game development in September 2020 in order to work on a wildlife sanctuary. That's in spite of the fact that Ancel insisted Wild would continue on without him. What exactly the French studio has been doing since then is unclear. While the company hasn't been hiring for a while now, publicly available LinkedIn data suggests that Wild Sheep still has approximately 20 employees as of August 2024. Although the studio has never been credited on a single released game, that doesn't preclude the possibility that it's been doing outsourced work since Wild's cancellation. The company's official website no longer contains any Wild artwork and has been stripped down to a single landing page.

A decade following its original announcement, Wild remains one of the most distinct open-world game concepts ever pitched. The game was meant to be set in the Neolithic era, also known as the New Stone Age, the final stage of technological development among prehistoric humans. Players were supposed to be able to control both animals and humans, and explore a map that was roughly the size of Europe, which would have made Wild one of the largest open-world games ever made.

A dynamic weather system was also planned to be part of the package, together with online play and some RPG mechanics. Ancel once said that Wild would even allow players to befriend and bond with animals rather than just control them using shamanic powers.