PlayStation’s long-missing exclusive Wild has finally been shut down, it’s claimed

Wild, the PlayStation exclusive adventure game announced in 2014, has reportedly been cancelled after years of public silence around the project.

That’s according to journalist Jeff Grubb, who claimed in a Giant Bomb video (paywall) on Thursday that the Michel Ancel (Rayman, Beyond Good & Evil) title had ceased production.

“I can confirm that game is fully done. There is no Wild anymore… Wild is dead,” Grubb said.

He added: “I think Michel Ancel abandoned the project… he’s not working on it anymore, the project got shut down. The team that was working on it was looking at maybe trying to stay together and work on other projects.

“I don’t know what happened with that, but they were like, ‘we’re not working on [Wild] anymore, but we do have a lot of talent here, so maybe we can work on some stuff’.”

The LinkedIn page of Wild’s developer Wild Sheep Studio shows nearly 50 current employees at the developer and job ads for further positions.

Wild was announced at PlayStation’s Gamescom showcase in 2014. The on-stage demo showed a prehistoric, procedurally generated world, in which players would control a human shaman who could inhabit and control animals in order to fight other tribes and solve puzzles.

Little has been seen of Wild since then. In 2015 the game was shown again during Paris Games Week, and most recently designer Michel Ancel posted images of the game in 2017.

However, with three years having passed since there was an update on Wild, Ancel announced his retirement from the video game industry in September 2020.

At the time Ancel claimed that his decision to step away from the games industry would not affect the development of Wild or his other project, Beyond Good & Evil 2, which is officially still in production at Ubisoft.

“Since many months now the teams are autonomous and the projects are going super well. Beautiful things to be seen soon,” he said at the time.