[Review] Beyond Good & Evil 2

[Inkriql]

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is an upcoming action-adventure video game in development by Ubisoft Montpellier and published by Ubisoft. It is a prequel to "Beyond Good & Evil", published in 2003. Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt and rumors about the future of the game, until it was officially announced at the Ubisoft conference in E3 2017, although no information about the target launch or platform has been disclosed.

Playability
Beyond Good & Evil 2 is an action-adventure video game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective that takes place a few generations before the events of Beyond Good & Evil.1 It has more traditional elements in comparison with the first game; The player will generate a character that will start the game "at the very bottom of the social system." 1 The character can be masculine or feminine.2 As the player completes several tasks, he will improve on several attributes, and gain spacecraft and crew members that can also improve over time. The player will visit planets that have their own societies, and by completing tasks on these planets, they will gain new technologies or other facets to improve their spaceship. 1 Its director, Michel Ancel, said they anticipate that there will be a narrative element that includes fixed events in the story, as well as events based on the decisions the player had made in the exploration of planets.

The game will have support for players either in solitary and cooperative mode; Even as an individual player, the player can participate in a shared universe, with some events affecting all players at the same time.

Developing

 

Beyond Good and Evil 2 has languished for several years, and is considered to have been in the hell of development.

The original game Beyond Good & Evil, released in 2003, was critically praised and gained a cult following, but was considered a commercial failure. Ancel explained that when writing the game's universe, he realized that it was bigger than it could practically include within a single game, and therefore anticipated that the game would be the first in a trilogy of works. However, the poor sales of this game left its publisher Ubisoft reluctant to invest in a sequel.

Rumors about a sequel began to circulate around 2007, beginning with an interview with Ancel in which he said he was working on a new project that was very personal for him, and mentioned his hopes of reusing Jade, the character-player of "Beyond Good & Evil", in a future project without changing his personality.4 Ancel said in an interview in May 2008 with the French magazine Jeuxvideo.fr that the sequel to Beyond Good & Evil had been in pre-production during a year, but had not yet been approved by Ubisoft.5 Later that same month, as part of its "Ubidays" event, Ubisoft released a trailer for the next Ancel project and its Ubisoft Montpellier studio, which had worked on Beyond Good & Evil The trailer used the musical resources of Beyond Good & Evil and showed characters that appeared to be Jade and Pey'j from the original Beyond Good & Evil. Ubisoft reported that the trailer had been recorded within the capabilities of the video game engine, displaying high-resolution graphics representative of the seventh-generation video consoles.6 7 A second leaked trailer appeared for the game on the Internet around May 2009, showing a character that seemed to be Jade running down a crowded street. The trailer was confirmed as authentic by Ancel, while Ubisoft denied that they had published it on purpose.8 9 10

From these trailers, until 2016, the status of the program with Beyond Good and Evil 2 was unclear, with conflicting statements made by both Ubisoft and Ancel. While Ancel and Ubisoft reported several times that the game was still in development, rumors circulated that Ubisoft had put the game on hold, 11 12 13 14 that Ubisoft had not yet officially announced the title and that, so Therefore, production had not officially started, 15 16 17 and that Ancel had left Ubisoft Montpellier, 18 19 In 2016, Ancel said they had stopped working at Beyond Good & Evil 2 to develop Rayman Legends. (2013) that allowed them to produce tools that would help them with the production of Beyond Good and Evil 2; Once the work for Rayman Legends was finished, they returned to the sequel to Beyond Good & Evil.20 21 Later Ubisoft noticed that in the time of Ancel it was divided between Beyond Good & Evil 2 and Wild, a title developed by the studios Ancel's Wild Sheep Studios on the outskirts of Ubisoft. 22

At the end of 2016, Ancel used social media to publish images of the game, which showed a younger Pey'j, hinting that Beyond Good & Evil 2 could be a prequel. Ubisoft shortly thereafter officially announced the game.23 24 25 Ubisoft showed the first new Beyond Good & Evil 2 trailer during its conference at E3 2017 and was announced as a prequel to the first game.26 During E3 2017, Ancel confirmed that the trailers of 2008 and 2009 were from an initial work as a narrative sequel to Beyond Good & Evil, but during the development they chose to change direction and turn it into a prequel, so the work shown above was from an effectively different game .1 Launch platforms have not been announced. There had been rumors that it would have been released as an exclusive timed for the Nintendo Switch (under its codename NX) in the previous year, 27 but Ancel confirmed that this was not the case. The "Space Monkey Program" lists the game for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, however Michel Ancel stated that the platforms have not yet been announced, and that the list was due to an error.28 29 Ancel told him later to Kotaku that the game is designed to work on many platforms.

 

Edited September 7, 2019 by xl_Legend_lx