Beyond Good and Evil 2
Ubisoft is under siege on all sides right now, where in the last couple months alone it has released a somewhat underperforming Star Wars game in Outlaws, has seen XDefiant’s playercount drop, has delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows and disbanded its Prince of Persia team. All of this has led to share price declines and talk of taking the company fully private.
So, you will pardon some skepticism about this report that yes, despite being announced in 2008, and re-revealed in 2017, Ubisoft claims that progress is still being made on Beyond Good and Evil 2.
The report is from Kotaku who had Ubisoft confirm that the game has a new creative director Fawzi Mesmar, who replaces Emile Morel, who tragically passed away in 2023. The original two heads of the project, creator Michel Ancel and producer Guillaum Brunier are no longer on the project. Ancel left Ubisoft in 2020 an Brunier was replaced by Francis Coldeboeuf, as reported by Kotaku in July.
It is genuinely hard to believe that this game still exists in the deepest bowels of development hell. Here’s the original trailer from 2008 if you forgot when this was in fact originally announced:
And then the new, attention-grabbing cinematic trailer that premiered seven years ago in 2017 at E3, back when E3 still existed.
It remains stunning that Ubisoft, a company that is down to just a $1.5 billion market cap, is juggling so many projects and franchises at any given time. Bungie, a single-game studio, was bought by Sony for $3.5 billion. Ubisoft has Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Avatar, Star Wars, The Crew, Prince of Persia and any number of Tom Clancy-branded games in production at any given time. Now a return to Rayman as well, it seems. Plus, what should be a huge AAA project, Beyond Good and Evil 2, lurking in the background for a decade and a half? Suffice to say the idea that Ubisoft is spread too thin makes sense. Granted they have a lot of employees, 19,000 by last count, but its worth has shrunk to a tiny fraction of other, much smaller studios over the years. Activision Blizzard has 13,000 employees and was bought by Microsoft for $69 billion.
I have trouble believing that Beyond Good and Evil 2 will ever actually come out, no matter what they’re saying here. Ubisoft has enough issues where this does not seem like something they will be able to wrestle control of, but I guess we’ll wait and see.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
