What is up with Beyond Good and Evil 2?

 Beyond a joke at this point.

Maybe I just hit my head and the dizzied fragments of my concussion have been conjuring misremembered phantoms for me, indicative of some real troubling brain damage, or Beyond Good and Evil 2 was indeed, announced a while back and is still in development limbo. In fact, let me look it up quickly- Yep, guess my brain is still working, this title was announced back in- oh my god, 2008? Is it ever going to launch? Nah, I'm messing with yah. There was indeed a BGE2 announced back in 08, but that version of the project was quietly cancelled. Still, we've been waiting on this new-and-improved BGE 2 (which is actually a prequel to BGE 1, but let's not split hairs) for about 5 years now and although I'm not one to sit there tapping my watch when it comes to videogame development, I'm going to make an exception here: What the hell are any of those guys even doing? I mean seriously, we've had a whole new console generation pop up in the time since the 2017 announcement and now, with not even a single polished gameplay demo to show for it!

And to be clear, I'm not someone deeply in love with the 'exciting prospect' of a new Beyond Good and Evil game. I know the original is a cult classic, and I see it as an exceptionally fun 'Dreamworks/Miyazaki to Disney'-equivalent game for it's time, but I wouldn't be calling out any great injustice if the franchise was literally never picked up again. I didn't care much for the story, and the world might very well be best in the tiny dose of it that we were fed, who's to say. That being said, I'm not remotely against seeing any more of Jade and her adventures either. That world really was really bubbling with character and personality that almost felt like their own take on Outer Rim Star Wars at times, only with more thematic consistency. Some of the missions were pretty fun with cool and unique environments to explore, and the combat system was... well the combat was as good as you could expect for 2003 but I wasn't personally in love with it. There is potential with a sequel to really strive out and become a dose of fresh air to the gaming world, and Ubisoft really does need a fresh new idea that isn't a bullet in the foot of their own public reputation. (Despite how much I know they love their Crypto duties.) 

So then the question is: where is that sequel? In any form? At the time of the announcement, Ubisoft and the developers on this product in particular spoke a big game about creating a title that was going to revolutionise action adventure as we know it. A huge playspace that would encompass an entire foreign solar system, impeccably designed sci-fi cities just dripping with cultural influences and a procedurally evolving world that would be updated with seasonal content so that the game was forever offering new activities! Okay, so that last bit wasn't actually all that exciting and really just sounded like a Live Service, like it inevitable was going to be. (and which we've kind of seen reflected in other flagship Ubisoft series' since) but all that stuff about scale was mindblowing. Being able to fly your tiny ship into a huge flagship and jump from planet to planet? That's Star Citizen Territory! And maybe that comparison is less surface level than I originally believed because neither game displays any hope of being completed within the next decade.

There was even the Space Monkey Program, who remembers that? It was a emailing list that one could sign up to in order to be kept up to date on the progress of the project, and one which I don't believe has been updates since late 2019. That was where we were gifted some of those lingering snippets of rough-looking pre-alpha gameplay you might find floating around, all of which are excessively experimental but benefit from bubbly and passionate sounding team members cheering it's praises and promising us that something special awaits these gameplay chunks once the polish has been applied. And then they went dark, out of the blue, and we haven't heard a thing since. This is the kind of treatment you'd expect from a Kickstarter game with devs who have wholly jumped ship, not a division of the incredibly successful Ubisoft company- Where is all of that communication which the community was promised?

Well believe it or not, we have actually heard a mention of the game somewhat recently, (half a year back) curtsey of 'sentient chunk of lint-roller fluff', Yves Guillemot. Realising the monumental amount of angst shared by a community desperate for substantive news, he rose from his high castle, donned his finest BS tone and rolled up upon an earnings call with this diamond morsel to throw to us savages. "It's coming along quite well." Oh- is that it? two and a half years since we've heard a whisper of a murmur and all we're given is 'Yeah it's cool, stop asking'. I don't know if it's sensible for me to feel as insulted as I do by that. But similarly I can't really help myself, now can I? Yves: Ubisoft is not 'going well'; your business both inside, with the rampant abuse allegations warding away clients, and out, with your reputation among the wider community being similarly torpedoed, is not 'going well'; so how about you give us something with a bit for value to it concerning BGE2? So that we can see for ourselves just exactly what is, and what isn't, 'going well'.

What's more, why is Yves talking for this game on the developer's behalf? Wasn't one of the draws of the Space Monkey program being that the active team would be communicating with the consumers, safe from the corporate-buzzword filter of stuffy management types? Yet now we've got Yves as our sole spokesperson, undermining any progress or complications befalling the project with his handwaving platitude remark? You can't just feed crap to us in desperate hope that we'll just nod our heads and go 'that sounds about right' without looking any deeper ourselves. It's like a father going to school before prom and telling everyone exactly why they should invite his daughter; it's embarrassing and rank. (Don't think too hard about that metaphor, I really wanted to make it.)

The only other significant event to happen during the breadth of Beyond Good and Evil 2's life cycle is the exorcising of the game's director Michel Ancel. Yes, he departed the company during the wave of Ubisoft departures, and a French Newspaper who were following the developments of the company have attested that his leadership might have caused a lot of the problems with the development. With him allegedly being abusive and disorganised, thus leading to an unfocused vision for the game, so that it had to be rebooted several times over. So with him out of the way does that finally mean that BGE 2 is on track? Of course not, that just means even more delay as the project had to switch hands and maybe even some plan rearrangements because this game apparently wants to rival 'Duke Nukem Forever' in development hell miles. 

Despite all the misgivings that hound this game I remain confidant that it will someday come out. Will it be the same game that we were advertised back in 2017? No. Will it resemble that vision close enough that we can squint and pretend it's the same game? Possibly. Ubisoft has hit several nerves in recent years so it's essential for their own sake that they portray competence in making games, if not in supporting them, so I'd imagine that marketing will try hard to downplay the many shuffles around the game. My prediction: This year we're going to get another tease, maybe a whole new trailer, but it won't come with any gameplay, promises and certainly not a release window. And thus we will start this whole waltz with the void as we play the 'has it been cancelled yet' game once more. Welcome to the uncertainty train, BGE2, take a seat right next to VTMB2; we'll see to you in a bit.