This was the E3 for lost and forgotten projects suddenly springing to life but there’s no rest for video game fans, especially those who love Beyond Good and Evil. The sequel was announced way back in 2009 with a short teaser trailer and we’ve heard nothing since. Games don’t happen overnight but over half a decade is a bit long no matter what title we’re talking about. We did see some possible footage, another trailer, pop up but with no official statement or denial if what we were seeing was real or a fan’s wishes and hopes on display. Then in 2014 things really seemed to go sour for this sequel.
Michel Ancel, creator of Beyond Good and Evil and Rayman, left Ubisoft and started his own development company and began working on a new game called Wild. Ubisoft and Ancel claimed he was still tied to the publisher and was working on Beyond Good and Evil 2 despite having gone off on his own. Then Gamespot news editor Tamoor Hussain did some digging and though he couldn’t confirm some of the facts does say that he’s “been told it’s been abandoned—in a big way. The studio has moved on. The key people from that studio that were making it moved onto other projects outside of Ubisoft. Like I said, I might be wrong on that, but I had enough of it to chase that small lead.”.
The story gets strange when IGN jumps in as well. In a story that has since been pulled down from the site, with no reason given as to why, IGN spoke to Ubisoft’s VP marketing and sales Tony Key. Key did say he wanted to see another game in the series but said Ancel was very busy and ” no…He’s got things going on and I can’t really comment on his bandwidth.”. With no comment as to why that story was taken down or any comment from Ubisoft about Beyond Good and Evil it’s starting to look bad for fans. The new generation of hardware makes any older titles formerly in development even harder to finish since it’ll need to be upgraded or converted to the newer systems. Maybe the title will pull and Last Guardian and appear, suddenly, at an E3 in the future but for now we’ll have to wait. For now just watch this leaked footage and wonder what could be.
i’ve never seriously expected beyond good and evil 2 to exist, but i’ve been hoping for a sequel to what is one of my favorite games since i was six or seven, apparently! it feels like it wasn’t that long ago but yeah, 2003. so to just see all of these signs of it being completely abandoned is disappointing, but i know plenty of people want it to come back, so maybe it’ll be a nice surprise later on!
I know, it’s such a huge disappointment. I can’t help but think of it as like, the pinnacle of the collectathon third person adventure. I honestly don’t think its been surpassed by anything like it since it came out.