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[PC] [ONE] [PS4] Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

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[PC] [ONE] [PS4] Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Unread postby icycalm » 24 Apr 2015 03:47

http://www.vg247.com/2015/04/23/assassi ... d-odyssey/

Sherif Saed wrote:Assassin’s Creed creator’s new game is Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is the game Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets has been working on.

ancestors_the_humankind_odyssey_header_1-600x260.png
ancestors_the_humankind_odyssey_header_1-600x260.png (34.75 KiB) Viewed 27076 times


Patrice Desilets has just announced that the next game his indie studio Panache Digital Games is making is called Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.

The announcement comes from Desilets’s keynote at the Reboot Develop event in Croatia.

The trailer started by listing some of the greatest achievements and tribulations in human history from the recent Higgs boson scientific discovery, going back in time to Charles Darwin’s birth, the Wright brothers’ aviation invention, the Crusades, all the way back to the early tools first devised by humans.

The game’s tagline is “the greatest journey of all, our own.”

Desilets unfortunately did not stick around to elaborate or reveal any more details. Though he did say that his studio is hiring, so don’t expect gameplay footage any time soon.

The game’s website is now live and describes the project as a “third person action-adventure survival episodic game”. Each episode will let the player “relive the greatest moments of mankind with a documentary twist.”

Take a look at the teaser that was shown earlier, courtesy of AGB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaX9jLXkzcQ


I really like that last line in the title image above. Apart from that, the "documentary" angle sounds about as exciting as a real documentary compared to a proper movie. (Documentaries aren't art, fyi.)
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Unread postby Some guy » 25 May 2019 16:46

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey Out Aug. 27 for PC, December. for PS4 & Xbox One
https://www.allgamesdelta.net/2019/05/a ... ailer.html

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Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey - 101 Trailer EP1: Explore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqc7som ... indOdyssey

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey - 101 Trailer EP2: Expand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM0OERl ... indOdyssey

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey to Launch for PC on August 27, 2019 and Consoles in December 2019

Private Division and Panache Digital Games today announced that Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey will launch for PC via the Epic Games Store on August 27, 2019, and digitally for PS4 system and Xbox One in December 2019. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is the debut title from Panache Digital Games, the independent development studio co-founded in 2014 by Patrice Désilets, the original creative director of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

The game is available on PC exclusively through the Epic Games Store for the first year, at which point it will come to additional digital PC retailers.

In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, players are challenged to survive and evolve in the harsh yet beautiful land of Africa spanning from ten million to two million years ago. As humankind’s primate predecessors, players explore Neogene Africa, expand their territory, and evolve to advance their clan from one generation to the next in order to survive in this innovative take on the open world survival genre. The game and its mechanics rely on evolution, discovery, and survival as players traverse a variety of terrain and environments, encounter various predators, and learn new abilities to pass along to the next generation of their clan.

“Our goal for Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is to provide an experience no player has ever lived before”, said Patrice Désilets, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Panache Digital Games. “Our small team is creating an ambitious and immersive game with a unique setting that will captivate gamers of all types, and we look forward to players exploring our world later this year.”

“Private Division and Panache Digital Games share a passion for providing the best possible experience to all our players,” said Kari Toyama, Senior Producer at Private Division. “As partners, we support Panache in taking the time to ensure all versions of Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey deliver the standard of polish upon release that the team has set for themselves. As a developer focused publisher, this is an important approach we take in working with smaller independent teams.”

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In conjunction with the release date announcement, Panache Digital Games and Private Division have unveiled the official key art for Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. The team has also released the second episode of a three-part video series featuring Patrice Désilets explaining the game’s unique mechanics and concepts.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey game will support the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Castilian), Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Polish, Portuguese and Arabic. For more information on Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, visit AncestorsGame.com.

About Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a third-person open world survival game where you Explore, Expand, and Evolve to advance your clan to the next generation in this exhilarating new adventure from the creator of Assassin’s Creed.

Embark on the most incredible odyssey known to humankind: human evolution. Spanning from 10 million to 2 million years ago, begin your journey, “Before Us,” in Neogene period Africa. Explore a beautiful yet ruthless world, from swinging through tree branches in the jungle to stalking prey across the golden savannah grasslands. Decide what attributes to learn and hone in order to pass down knowledge to future generations, from crafting tools to enhancing evasive tactics against predators. Just like real life, make sure to eat, drink, and sleep to stay alive and have the energy to face any danger that may come your way.

Grow your clan and find strength in numbers as you progress through critical evolutionary stages of human evolution. Your choices will write your clan’s story and determine if you can survive your evolution.

Key Features

• Explore Ruthless Africa: Explore the never-before-experienced world of Neogene Africa starting 10 million years ago at the dawn of humankind. From the tops of tree canopies overlooking lush jungles to the golden grasslands of the savannah, traverse a beautiful yet unforgiving landscape. For every breath-taking view, beware of the weather, predators, and other dangers that threaten your survival.

• Expand Your Territory and Grow Your Clan: Increase your chances of survival by uniting new members of your species and giving birth to future generations. Control different clan members, form bonds to create families, and work together to intimidate predators during expeditions. Conquer fear as you explore unknown locations in order to expand your territory.

• Evolve Through Multiple Generations: See the physical and intellectual evolution of the first hominids as you explore, learn, and survive. Spanning from 10 million to 2 million years ago, play as one of the first hominids and evolve over the course of millions of years during key stages in human evolution. Make crucial discoveries and hone physical abilities that will be passed down to future generations such as Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus.

• Choose How You Survive: Evolution was not written in stone. Your decisions shape how you will overcome obstacles, increase your species, and what knowledge will pass on to future generations. Focus on specific attributes or choose a more balanced approach to survival. Your clan’s ability to survive will be directly impacted by your choices, making each player’s experience unique.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 07 Jan 2020 21:42

It's kinda hard to get a bead on this game since it seems like it could get significantly more complex later on. Or it might not. And I think this is what could make or break it for me; whether I've already found the extent to which the game's depth runs. It could potentially expand a fair amount more though, since you're supposed to be playing through those stages of Ape evolving into Man. I haven't reached even a tenth of the way through based on the million-year time span during which the game is set, and I've played for ten or so hours.

The game does a lot of things pretty damn well and it's mostly centered on how immersive the crafting, gathering, hunting and traversing the world are. There aren't any menus or the like for any of this stuff, you pick twigs off trees and the tree looks a little more bare, there's a button to zoom in on what items you are holding. Even the status effects, like being cold, bleeding, broken bones, etc. are visually represented on your character.

The user interface is mostly intuitive once you've figured out what buttons do what, and even during the stage of figuring out the controls it's like you're a monkey yourself figuring out your own motor skills, learning to grasp things, accidentally dropping or even breaking them. There's a pretty good crafting system in here, you grab two objects and smack them together until it changes the second object into something useful, but put too much power into it and you'll destroy one of them. A convenient sound cue tells you when to release the button, and you'd better get used to listening for it since it's ever-present in crafting, gathering, and even combat. It's fun to figure out what can be turned into something more useful this way, and every time I'd found something new it felt like I had accomplished something significant. It's kinda hard to figure out more combos later on though (it starts to feel like one of those adventure games where there's only a single solution to what you want to make), but the dreams you get while sleeping clue you in a little to some possibilities.

There's a kind of rudimentary building system too, I've managed to make a nest to sleep in and a small wall made of branches so far. You just stack a few things together and press the button to initiate construction. I just hope what you can build gets expanded later on, since I haven't found much else I can make.

Combat is fairly simple, it's basically fight or flight. Time slows down whenever a predator pounces on you, and you have the option of either dodging and running away, or attacking with whatever weapon you have in your hands. Both options could potentially get you killed, and you might even lose whatever you are carrying either through dropping it, or breaking it upon the creature. Even if you time it well you might not make it depending on whether your monkey is healthy or not. There are a slew of negative status effects after all, each of which can be treated with different food. Also you can't simply stick around near a predator since there's a fear mechanic; get too scared and you'll lose control of your monkey, which is tantamount to dying. I haven't found out if the player can initiate an attack yet though, I'm assuming it's part of the upgrade tree that I haven't seen, but I also haven't tried to throw rocks or anything either. I hope that this will be possible though, since there are a bunch of birds that I've seen around that I'd like to take down and eat. It feels awesome to kill something, the first time I managed to kill a boar after having slowly figured out how to make a sharpened spear over the course of the many hours I'd played it was the absolute height of my experience so far.

Jumping around on trees is incredibly intuitive, and feels great too. You automatically attach to the trunk or branch when you jump onto it, and it's very free-form. There's no map, so you'll often be climbing high on a tree to figure out where you are.

There are a few problems I'm already noticing though, and the largest one is the actual skill tree/evolution system. It's the only menu that the game has (aside from the start and pause menus, but those don't count), and you use it to gain new abilities, like being able to eat meat, holding things in both hands, and having the other monkeys follow your instructions. There's quite a complex system here, and I won't go into it that much, but you can tell they've tried their best to tie it into the rest of the systems the game has. There's just a big glaring flaw, and it's mostly tied to the generational thing they have going here. See, at some point you're going to have to start playing as the next generation (you basically skip time until the babies have all grown up), and then what happens is that you lose most of these goddamn points that you have spent ages painstakingly building up. You only get to choose a few to keep, so suddenly you don't have the ability to eat mushrooms, you can't sense things as far away as before, and your clan's chimps will no longer listen to instructions (even though some of them are still remnants of the older generation which did, so wtf is up with that?) It feels like a huge step back, and is very frustrating every time you have to do it. And you will have to change generations and evolve at some point, since that's the only way you can evolve abilities that you can't get any other way. I can see why they've done it like this, to prevent people from simply playing as the one chimp and then getting all the abilities in a single generation. And while that would probably be kinda retarded in a game that you're supposed to be playing over the in-game course of millennia, maybe the very idea of playing as many generations is retarded itself? Just a thought. It's not like I'm forgetting everything that happens in-between each generation, so all the stuff that would be new to one chimp is all shit I've already done before. I'd probably kill myself if I had to watch a single lifetime of these chimps in real time, let alone a million years of it lol.

Also, the survival aspect is a little too lacking. All you need is food, drink and sleep to survive. Some shelter from rain too I suppose. All of which can be found in your initial base. And the food and resources respawn super-quickly too; I once went on an expedition by myself for a day, and returned to find all the coconuts on the trees had returned, hell even the dead twigs on a tree had grown back. There's very little incentive to pack up your stuff and find a much better campsite. It's great to be able to do so though, since it's pretty awesome to explore new territory, get over the fear of being away from your base and find a settlement elsewhere with all your chimp gang backing you up. The devs have taken the phrase "monkey see, monkey do" a little too literally though since the rest of your clan don't do anything if you aren't around. They only eat, sleep and drink whenever you do it in front of them; I once came back after a couple of days to all the monkeys being near dead from starvation and thirst. There are no rival clans of monkeys either, at least not that I've seen yet anyway. This last point could potentially be a deal-breaker.

Anyway, I think I'll definitely want to play more, but only since there's a possibility that it might get harder and more complex. The moment that hope gets snuffed out is when I drop the game. What's there is worth playing though, even if only for a long evening.

Here's my playthrough of the game so far:

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey with ChevRage 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=civ0XGAbNT0
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey with ChevRage 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF0njkKXWG0
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey with ChevRage 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B_akMJDaEA
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey with ChevRage 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwyGZYwu5xg
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