14 DAY TRIAL // Yoan Fanise, the game director of acclaimed Ubisoft adventure game Valiant Hearts: The Great War, has decided to leave the studio and pursue new opportunities.
Fanise spent 14 years working at Ubisoft, starting with Beyond Good & Evil, back in 2001, together with Michel Ancel.
He hoped to recapture that personal indie spirit when he started working on Valiant Hearts, as he was growing increasingly frustrated with the impersonal nature of the AAA industry, and of mammoth projects like Assassin's Creed.
During a recent interview, he revealed that the team working on Beyond Good & Evil started out as a 30-member outfit that had a unique creative output and mood. It then started to grow, and as it gained new members, the personal mood began to diminish, and the projects started lacking on the creative and human side.
"The industrial scale and organization of a giant project like Assassin's Creed removes some direct connection between people from different job categories, for example. Your interactions are limited, and it is really difficult to have a global vision of the finished game. But at that scale, it would be very hard to make it different," he told Gamasutra.
When undertaking Valiant Hearts: The Great War, Fanise hoped to bring back the spirit of Beyond Good & Evil, the collegial creative process that he had enjoyed so much way back.
Valiant Hearts and Child of Light were a breath of fresh air among blockbusters
Unfortunately, market realities don't always cross paths with one's hopes and dreams. He said that, even when small-scope games do become a success, selling over a million copies, it's still small revenue compared to Ubisoft's blockbusters.
Furthermore, he pointed out that, when he was called out for being a "fake indie," working at a small project at Ubisoft, he decided that going independent for real was the way to go.
For the time being, Fanise does not have anything specific on his plate. He mentioned "a lot of really interesting opportunities," and said that he would be taking his time to find the one that feels the most exciting to him.
A similar experimental small-scale project was Child of Light, which also turned out to be a profitable venture. The project stemmed from the Far Cry 3 Director Patrick Plourde's desire to create a game that he could play with his daughter.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a highly atmospheric game that deals with the human side of war and its impact on regular people. Instead of glorifying conflict and casting the spotlight on so-called heroes, the adventure title entertains and enlightens by showing a different perspective on one of the greatest conflicts in human history.
