I think it’s safe to say that Michel Ancel has been through some shit when it comes to Beyond Good & Evil.
The creator of the cult 2003 adventure hit has been trying to get a sequel made for what feels like forever. We first reported on Beyond Good & Evil 2 in 2008 when it was little more than concept art and a cinematic trailer, and in the nine years since we’ve seen...not much else.
Indeed, the fate of the game was so mired in secrecy—and as the years tallied, appeared more and more like vapourware—that I wrote a story in April 2016 basically saying “abandon all hope” when it came to the prospect of ever playing Beyond Good & Evil 2.
Yet here we are a year later, and there’s a new trailer. One radically different from that original almost a decade ago, suggesting that the game has been entirely retooled in the years since, but a vision that Ubisoft are so confident in that it formed the cornerstone of their E3 press conference.
Now, it’s not like this is out next week. No gameplay was shown, and as Ancel himself said, BG&E2's current iteration only entered pre-production last year. So there’s still time for calamity to strike and for this to never come out.
But you know what, I’m done with pessimism. I loved Beyond Good & Evil, and would love to play another one.
And I love, amidst all the suits and prepared speeches and slick presentations during E3, to see something human on show at a major publisher’s press conference. Like Ancel taking to the stage, a tear in his eye, to finally get a chance to present something to the world that he’s been toiling away on for a decade of his life.
You can see his full talk on Beyond Good & Evil 2 below (If autoplay doesn’t work on your platform, it’s 2:05:24):