PlayStation has reportedly canceled an upcoming PS4 exclusive. With the PS4’s lifecycle coming to an end, it’s scheduled to get a few more exclusive games like Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok, but soon Sony’s first and second-party output will be purely focused on the PS5. That said, one game PS4 users shouldn’t expect to ever see is PS4’s long-missing exclusive, Wild, from Michael Ancel, the creator of both Rayman and Beyond Good and Evil. It’s been seven years since Wild was first announced for the PS4, and as a result, many have written it off as vaporware or completely forgotten about it altogether. Suffice to say, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that according to industry insider, Jeff Grubb, it’s been canned.
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The timeline of Wild begins back in 2014, when Wild Sheep Studios, with Michael Ancel at the helm, announced the open-world action-adventure game with survival elements as a PS4 exclusive. To this day, it’s unclear what Sony‘s involvement was with the game, but it appears it was a second-party relationship, suggesting, at the very least, Sony was providing resources for the game’s development.
A year later, the game’s second trailer was released. And that was the last we ever saw of the game, which had a considerable buzz around it. 2016, 2017, and 2018 were years of complete silence, minus one update in 2017 from the aforementioned Ancel featuring new screenshots. It wasn’t until 2019 that the game reemerged after Sony filed a trademark for the title. This prompted an update from Wild Sheep Studios, which confirmed it was still working on the game. What followed this was more silence until April 2020, when the game emerged again, this time because new concept art for the game was uploaded to the website of Wild Sheep Studios.
Since then, we haven’t seen or heard anything about the game, until this week, when Grubb, via Giant Bomb, relayed word that the project has been canceled. Unfortunately, Grubb doesn’t couple this with information as to why it’s been cancelled.
As you may know, Michael Ancel announced his retirement from the industry back in 2020, so there’s a chance his rather sudden departure contributed to the game being canceled.
All of that said, for now, none of this has been confirmed. Officially, the game is still in development until PlayStation or Wild Sheep Studios confirms it isn’t. At the moment of publishing, neither party has commented on this report. If this changes, we will be sure to update the story accordingly. In the meantime, take everything here with a grain of salt. While Grubb has proven reliable in the past, he has also been off the mark in the past as well.
