From Gaf:

Having spent 14 years at Ubisoft, Valiant Hearts director Yoan Fanise has decided to leave the French publisher in order to seek a fresh start. Fanise had worked on Beyond Good & Evil back in 2001 with Michel Ancel, and he hoped to recapture that indie spirit when Ubisoft allowed him to work on Valiant Hearts, but the developer also grew increasingly frustrated with the seemingly impersonal nature of big AAA projects like Assassin's Creed.

"Beyond Good & Evil was a 30+ team production with a unique, creative mood that Michel Ancel is able to bring. The more we grew, the more this mood diminished. 100, 250, 500 people...it was necessary due to the technical evolution and AAA requirements, but on the creative and human side something was missing," he noted to Gamasutra.

"I mean 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."

It came as a relief to Fanise to work on something like Valiant Heart, a project, he said, that looked "to bring back the Beyond Good & Evil spirit, the collegial creative process." That being said, market realities are sometimes hard to swallow.

"I mean, business-wise, even if the game is a success, with over a million players and many awards, this is still small revenue compared to blockbusters. That's the harsh reality," he said, adding that after being called "fake indie" for working on a small project at Ubisoft, he may as well consider going independent for real.

Fanise has not committed to anything just yet, however. "There are a lot of really interesting opportunities, and I'm still taking time to find the one that is most exciting," he said.

agreed.
They should give AAA status for some of those games.
MS should make a physical copy of ori and the blind forest, market it as well as a AAA, and make sure it is long enough. Id pay 50$ for a game like this. I would even buy a console.

Also ubisoft. Sony is in the way. Nintendo is almost there (mostly because dont have other choice).

He makes an interesting point. Large companies like Ubisoft will have multiple studios in different cities working on the same game, which can result in creative differences etc. An example of this would be AC3. In AC3, one studio worked on the entire singleplayer but were tasked to a different game later on (forget which one) and a different studio was tasked with finishing the game and adding multiplayer. I realize it is a bit of a circle jerk to bring up Naughty Dog but they could be taken as proof that direct connection during development can make a difference in quality.

That remind me, I have to go download Valiant Hearts.

It's a very good game.

Fuck what people say. Just enjoy your job. Fake indie, real indie? Fuck em'. Random idiots on the internet are gonna to say some stupid shit from time to time. Can't believe he's letting this impact his life/day job.

Most of the time.