"Civilization Tech Tree Meets Assassin's Creed" Is the Pitch for New Dawn of Humanity Game

The next game from Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Desilets is aiming to be "Civilization tech tree meets Assassin's Creed." That's the phrase Desilets himself used to describe the title, a third-person action-survival game called Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, in a new interview with Kotaku.

The game certainly sounds ambitious, beginning with the dawn of humanity and running all the way through to humankind's command of the world.

“For me, it's fascinating that those little one-meter chimp with a kind of weird brain kind of took control of this planet and is totally destroying it," Desilets said. "Your character and family will have the scars of your decisions... We're not into caveman yet, we're before that. We go up."

Ancestors is currently in development at Desilets' new game studio, Panache Digital Games. A team of seven people are working on it right now. We've only seen one trailer, released last month during E3, and it didn't show much gameplay. But Desilets said he's hoping to have a playable version to show next year.

“The first-draft character is in it," Desilets said, explaining that players will begin their journey as a a pre-human Orrorin Tugenensis. "We're working on behaviors, how you work with the jungle."

Players will later take on other forms as part of the process of evolution. The game will play out as a series of episodes.

"We do an action sequence telling you the first time when we stood up," Desilets said. "We let you sprint, see forward then leave you in an open world and you survive as long as you can. In a later chapter you will eventually have a family that needs to survive, a tribe that needs to survive, but that is in the next chapters."

For lots more on Humankind, and Desilets' wider post-Ubisoft journey, be sure to read Kotaku's full interview.

Last month, Desilets spoke out how much room video games still have to grow.

"The goal is to someday build the Titanic for games," he said, referencing James Cameron's iconic 1997 film. "For that you need characters that are not assassins. It's all about trying to come up with subject matters that are more than, 'I'm shooting stuff, but I have emotion' that I feel games are stuck in."