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Rayman Legends

Michel Ancel: "It was nice to work on the Wii U"

Legendary developer talks Rayman Legends, Wii U and Beyond Good & Evil 2.

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Renowned game designer Michel Ancel, creator of Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil, paid Gamelabs in Barcelona a visit and we were there to talk to him about game development, Rayman Legends and a possible Beyond Good & Evil 2.

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Emotions was the subject of Ancel's session at Gamelabs and this is what the veteran developer had to say about the emotional aspect of games.

"My feeling is that most of the time when you're starting a game you say 'ok, I'm going to start to do a first person shooter, a platformer', and then what could be the story, and then what could be the actions and all these things. Yet the point of view could be different. It could be like I want to talk about the relationship between two different people that have nobody in common, this is going to be my subject. And then you think what gameplay could be good to tell that story, to bring those emotions."

"When you think like that, you really think all the mechanics in order to go in the direction of these experiences. For example maybe, if you want at a certain time in the game you will need these people to be connected. So maybe you will have a gameplay where you are holding the other one to maybe save him..."

Currently Ancel is back to working on his most famous creation Rayman.

"With Rayman Legends, specially with Rayman, I really wanted to clear my brain about all these things and really go directly into direct emotions like the humour and the pacing of the game. But it's not complex emotions. It's more like sports, and you have fun doing this sport like running, jumping, acrobatic moves... and you have this cool environment around it."

"I think surprisingly that we are very true to the first draft of the game. A video leaked from our studio at the very beginning of the project. It was the video that we had shown to the boss at Ubisoft Yves Guillemot, and when I look back at this video and the one we just released for E3, they're very close in fact. We just kept the same things and I'm proud of that, because sometimes when we're working with a big team, people have a lot of energy and it's nice to take this energy and do the right thing on the right time."

"Of course we were supposed to finish last year. The project at that time was very close to its end, but the top management said that we could add more time to add content, that the market would be better; so lots of reasons to continue."

On joining the #FreeRayman movement:

"We work in videogames, we're not politicians, we're not saving lifes or things like that, so we always need to look back at all these things and just remember that it's about games (laughs). Of course, it was the first time that we had people in our studio, the fans coming and it was really funny with all these pictures and the messages. We wanted the fun the team without thinking about all the talk there would be after like 'hey, this is a revolution'. It's like ball of snow that is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, but honestly we needed more joke than something else."

"We could have said 'we stop the Wii U and we only develop content for Xbox 360 and PS3'. But what we said was 'let's continue on the Wii U, add content on the Wii U', and the main excitement we had for that game specially was working on the Wii U. Working with Nintendo, having the early development kits, discovering the Wii U... so we kept that good energy until the end. It was nice to work on the Wii U."

"The thing with the Wii U is that is not easy for the mass market to understand what's cool inside of it".

That's what Satoru Iwata just said after E3...

"I see it myself at home, when I say to people 'look, we have that console, there's a touch screen that looks like a big smartphone or tablet, and people don't directly connect all these things as a system and see the fun... It will take time, I think at the beginning even the DS with the two screens, people were like "two screens - what is it for?" and then later you had games that you could open as a book, you had all those funny touch games and a lot of things that suddenly appear obvious. That's the risk when you're innovating maybe people aren't going as fast as you are."

No interview with Michel Ancel these days would be complete without the inevitable Beyond Good & Evil 2 question:

"I can't escape now, we have to do it?" (laughs)

"I think [on current platforms, Beyond Good & Evil 2] was possible, but with a lot of pain. It's always possible to do anything on any kind of console, but sometimes you need to spend your energy not on the optimisations or things like that".

"Yeah, now that we have the consoles around the corner we're working on them, we're trying to see how we can get the power out of those consoles because there are still things we need to understand on those consoles, but yes, Beyond Good & Evil is a project I always have in mind and I hope good things will come for this project very soon."

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Rayman LegendsScore

Rayman Legends

REVIEW. Written by Rasmus Lund-Hansen

"While Origins was fantastic, Legends is so packed with inspiration, ideas and inventiveness that its predecessor almost seems monotonous by comparison."



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