Former PlayStation Boss Sheds Light on Cancellation of Forgotten PS4 Game

Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida has opened up about one forgotten PS4 game that never ended up seeing the light of day. In the first years that the PS4 was on the market, a handful of games were announced for the console that were later scrapped. Perhaps one of the most famous PS4 games in this regard was Deep Down, which was set to be a new action title from Capcom. And while many fans still ask questions about Deep Down over a decade later, it’s another canceled PS4 game from one Ubisoft veteran that we’ve finally been given answers to.

In a conversation with MinnMax, Yoshida, who used to run PlayStation Studios, offered up some new insight on what happened to Wild. Developed by Wild Sheep Studio, Wild was first shown off in 2014 and was set to be published by Sony exclusively on PS4. The game later attempted to make the jump to PS5 but was eventually canned, primarily due to problems with its director, Michel Ancel. Now, Yoshida has explained more about what happened to Wild and says it was one of the most heartbreaking games that he ever had to scrap during his tenure at PlayStation.

“We were working with Michel Ancel’s team, Wild Sheep, on a project called Wild,” Yoshida said. “That vision was amazing. So we worked with them for a long time and possibly moved platforms from one to the next, but in the end, we had to cancel it. That was really disappointing.”

“There [were] lots of great ideas [that] didn’t really materialize into the actual game structure,” Yoshida explained of what went wrong. “It was really open kind of thinking. One of the earliest [pitches] was the map size of the game was the size of Europe.”

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For Yoshida to point to the scale of Wild as what ultimately undid the project isn’t much of a shock. As a director, Ancel has been criticized in the past for coming up with ideas that are far too gargantuan in size to the point that then creating said ideas becomes a monumental undertaking. This same issue with Wild has been levied upon Beyond Good & Evil 2 as well, which Ancel also previously helmed. And while BG&E2 is still in the works, it doesn’t seem much closer to actually releasing than it did a few years back.

[H/T Push Square]