Nascarbuc

Yeah, I can't wait. Knowing that Ubisoft decided to attach their name to the project makes me giddy. Unlike what happened at Infogrames and later at Atari, the IT team has everything it needs to make the game - whatever it turns out to be - they wanted to make. No money issues, history between Ubi and key IT players, creative and technical input from Ubi's other studios... I'm feeling pretty confident.

Ivory Tower employees have left quite a few clues on their Linkedin pages and some even on their personal blogs.

Hugues Poncet

Lead Artist vehicles - Technical vehicles Artist - Ubisoft

Ivory-Tower

March 2008 – Present (5 years) Lyon Area, France

francois BEUDIN

3D Car Artist

Ivory Tower

2010 – Present (3 years)

Lionel BILLAULT

Vehicle Artist

Ivory Tower

January 2009 – Present (4 years 2 months)Lyon, France

I guess one could safely assume that cars will play a role in IT's new game.

Charles Bensoussan (Game designer at Ivory Tower):

Currently working on an AAA new IP undisclosed project

> Conceive solo & multiplayer gamebricks

> Define needs for our engine mission editor

> Prototype coop mission using an in-house mission graph script tool

Grégory Joerger

Game Designer/Lead Level Designer

Ivory Tower

March 2009 – March 2011 (2 years 1 month)

Worked on a AAA multiplayer racing game.

As Game Designer :

...

Short stories

...

Loic Lacote

Lead Mission Programmer

Ivory Tower

July 2012 – Present (8 months)

Senior Game Programmer

Ivory Tower

August 2009 – July 2012 (3 years)

Short stories, Missions, co-op... hmmmmmm.

Franck Maestre (Also Online Technical Director at Ubisoft, worked on AC3's multiplayer side)

Lead Programmer - Online

Ivory Tower

January 2008 – March 2011 (3 years 3 months)Lyon Area, France

Game: Unannounced Next gen title

Design and programming of an hybrid MMO / P2P , client and backend architecture.

Ludovic Balsan, currently at IT, confirms the multi/p2p architecture.

Peter Connelly

Audio Lead

Ubisoft

November 2011 – November 2012 (1 year 1 month)Lyon Area, France

Audio Lead on undisclosed AAA and game changing IP

Serkan Hassan

Lead Designer

Ivory Tower

July 2011 – Present (1 year 8 months)Lyon Area, France

Working in a lead design capacity on an unannounced AAA console & PC project.

Interestingly, IT added a team member with a solid background in mmo games with combat elements in 2012, about the time Ubisoft got involved.

Older, two employees who left IT in 2009:

Yves Mesnard

Artist

Ivory Tower

February 2008 – January 2009 (1 year)

Artist at Ivory Tower in preproduction for a MMO racing game.

And finally, Vincent Blaschke gives us a clue regarding the project's codename at the time :

Vincent Blaschke

3D Freelance artist

Ivory Tower

April 2009 – May 2009 (2 months)Lyon Area, France

Modeling/Texturing next-gen in-game props on "route66" for IVORY TOWER.

I remember that another IT employee gave away the Route66 title as well, but that page isn't available at this time. Also unavailable was a blog featuring a couple renders that fit perfectly a game titled 'route 66'. Sadly, I couldn't access Hugues Poncet's portfolio anymore. There were a lot of vintage muscle cars and hotrods in both civilian racing and post-apocalyptic, weapon-equipped mode that perfectly fit the 'Route 66/Knights' speculation.

Based on those renders from two of IT's artists, the 'route 66' was looking like it was going to be a TDU meets Interstate 76 kind of game.

Now there's something interesting about that: Several of Eden now Ivory Tower key players had been working on a project that they were very keen on. The project was titled Knights and you can see artwork about it here:

http://www.benoitboucher.fr/site/knight.html

A rough translation of the description would go something like this: "Knights is a car game set in a post-apocalyptic universe and follows a scenarized structure alternating ferocious car combat and strategic missions. After a year in pre-production the project was unfortunately abandoned.

you can also find more info about Knights, Boris Mellet's attachment to the project and his stated dedication to revive the project at some point in time, on his blog at sofidp.free.fr.

Only speculation of course, but I can't really see Ubisoft getting involved in a niche like racing unless the game brings a lot more to the table in terms of innovation and originality.