Les Ants, Bernard Werber’s cult bestseller, is going to be adapted into a video game. And by a French studio! While waiting for its release on PC and consoles, in 2024, we can already discover this strategy game through some promising images…
France is a major player in video games and, in addition to titles from large studios such as Ubisoft, it sometimes produces small nuggets developed by independent studios – we are thinking in particular of straywhich was named Best Indie Game at the 2022 Game Awards. And The ants (Empire of the Ants) could well be one of them! As its title suggests, this is the video game adaptation of the eponymous literary success, written by Bernard Werber, published in 1991, distributed in millions of copies and translated into 22 languages – which will then become the first volume of The ant trilogy –, and which will take the form of a real-time third-person strategy game. To carry out this project, the French publisher Microids (Syberia, Tintin, Fort Boyard) has joined forces with the La Rochelle studio Tower Five (Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders, Lornsword: Winter Chronicle, XIII) as well as the novelist himself. And, from the first visuals of the game unveiled, the art direction seems radically different from what they have produced so far. If all goes as planned, The ants will be released in 2024 on all platforms, PC and consoles. We can even already add it to the libraries of Steam and Playstation Store.
Les Ants: a strategy game on the scale of insects
The ants will invite players to embody a brave ant and follow its adventures within the Bel-o-ka colony through the forest of Fontainebleau. “Players will dive into the heart of the ant universe and an epic adventure, where they will have to make a colony prosper through tactical and strategic battles in a microscopic world of disproportionate proportions”, promises Microids. The ambitious adaptation of a journey that promises not to be easy.
The game will be based on the Unreal Engine 5 graphics engine. The first visuals amaze us with the beauty of nature seen from the height of small intelligent insects, with a great sense of detail and nice transparency effects on the ants. The player, if he will embody an ant with a third person view, will also be able to control the entire colony in order to face dangers, predators but also other enemy colonies. He will have to make his colony prosper, explore, fight and forge alliances with the local fauna according to an evolving difficulty.
Regarding the gameplay, we know that the narration will be based on the rhythm of the seasons. This will have a real impact on the environment and game mechanics, which will adapt accordingly. Likewise, the rhythm of the day (day, night, dawn and dusk) will modify the game map – all places will probably not be accessible at the same time – since the physiology of ants reacts to changes in temperature. This is promising… provided you are not phobic about insects.