I Don't Think Ubisoft Cares About Beyond Good & Evil

I love Beyond Good & Evil. It’s not “the best game ever made,” but I love it. The game is, at its heart, a decent action-adventure game in the style of, say, the Legend of Zelda, with a very light dose of Metal Gear Solid and Pokemon Snap for flavor. The world is wonderful, its characters are compelling. The voice acting can be a little clunky, but most of the characters are well realized. The story, to top the whole thing off, is excellent. It’s not “the best story in a video game,” but it juggles humor and drama well, while touching on some pretty heavy themes, like propaganda and the power of the press. And the game ends on a stunning cliffhanger,with a powerful note that made me say, “oh wow, what comes next?”

The answer is, of course, nothing.

I’ll admit that I was late to the party with Beyond Good & Evil. The game originally released in 2003 across all platforms, but I first played the game in 2011 when the HD version was released on Xbox 360. This meant that once I had finished the game, the first thing I discovered upon wanting to learn more was that the sequel had already been announced and forgotten about. In 2008 Ubisoft released a trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2. Then, nothing was said about the game again. When the HD version of the original released in 2011, the only other thing we had for GB&E2 was some leaked gameplay.

It would be years before we heard about Beyond Good & Evil 2 again, but it wouldn’t quite be in the way we were expecting.

I remember sitting down to watch Ubisoft’s 2017 E3 press conference with a light ping of excitement in my heart. Michel Ancel, who was the creator and director of the original BG&E, had already been talking about the fact that work had started back up on the sequel. So we knew they were making it. BG&E2 was the final note of Ubisoft’s E3 conference that year, launching with a stunning CG trailer. And the trailer is stunning.

But it wasn’t really Beyond Good & Evil. Gone was the cartoony aesthetic of the original, replaced instead with a much more hyper-realistic look. The homely aesthetic of the planet Hillys had been dropped for a much more stylized cyberpunk, neon vibe. The fun quirky dialogue of the original instead replaced with… lots of awkward swearing. The most pressing thing, to me at least, was that none of the characters from the original game were present. No Jade, no Pey’j, no Double H.

None of these points are bad, per se, just a little surprising. Ancel had always talked about how he wanted the original to be set across multiple planets, but time and budget made that impossible. And times had changed since 2003, so a more realistic art-style was maybe to be expected.

Then in the days that followed E3, doubt began to pile on. The game was a prequel set years before Jade had even been born. The game was at “day zero” of its development, meaning it could be years before it even sees release. Ubisoft were on the verge of a hostile takeover as they went into E3, so many began to suspect that the games announcement was simply a PR stunt. The game was also teaming up with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s controversial hitRECORD group, farming out elements of the games development to the community, and offering a small amount of money in return.

Beyond that initial trailer, everything about Beyond Good & Evil 2 was filling me with doubt. Then, in 2018, Ubisoft released yet another trailer, highlighting more of the new characters. The most surprising thing about this trailer was the reappearance of Pey’j and Jade. This meant that in the year since the game had been initially shown off, the entire story had been reworked to include the characters everyone knew from the original. “This is great!” I thought to myself, “Maybe now they can actually resolve that cliffhanger!”

It really speaks to how early in development the game must have been that the entire story could be reworked in such a massive fashion without issue.

It’s been two years since then, and Ubisoft haven’t really spoken about BG&E2 much since. The games developers occasionally show off gameplay, but it should be noted that in the three years since the game was formally announced they’ve repeatedly shown off the same area of the game over and over again. Despite three years of engine dev, and three years of active development, Ubisoft Montpellier have very little to show for it. I know making video games is big, difficult, and complicated, but you’d think they would show even one other location from the supposed massive solar system the game is reportedly supposed to take place across.

My enthusiasm for BG&E2 waning, I decided earlier this year to replay the original game. I purchased the game on Steam, installed, and was greeted by an absolute mess of a video game. Frame rate issues caused the visuals and audio to de-sync, textures would flicker and disappear, there was no controller support to speak of. In my desperation, I installed Ubisoft’s own Uplay store and bought the game there, only to run into all of the same problems. After multiple attempts it dawned on me that this wasn’t even the HD version of the game; I guess in the nine years since it launched, Ubisoft have never bothered to port the HD version to PC.

This morning Ubisoft announced it was working on an adaptation of Beyond Good & Evil for Netflix. More than likely, this is being announced to get ahead of any potential leaks, like what just occurred with the leaked news of a Splinter Cell animated series. But thinking back to Ubisoft announcing BG&E2 as a PR stunt, one can’t help but wonder if Ubisoft are announcing this as a distraction from… well, all of the bad news currently leaking out of the company. Maybe that’s an overly cynical thought to have.

At this point I’m worried that Beyond Good & Evil 2 will once again fade into obscurity. Maybe Ubisoft Montpellier have been working on this game for so long that Ubisoft would have no choice but to release something. I'm worried that we'll have another No Man's Sky on our hands, the promise of a fully active and explorable solar system certainly draws easy comparisons of a developer reaching for the moon while sitting in a sailboat, and only showing off a single city within that solar system despite three years of dev time certainly doesn't inspire confidence.

Beyond Good & Evil might not be "the best game ever," but it's legacy now is having the cult status it struggled to attain wheeled out on stage to make it's fans happy, before being wheeled back into the closet to gather dust for another few years.

I think the stuff that's come out about their culture and in particular the stuff about the cancelled King Arthur game makes me think that because BGE wasn't going to be a typical Ubi game it was put on the back burner.

It is very surprising that there still is no HD version on PC. Here are some ways to better enjoy the original on PC.

Graphic Mods

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=950083683

Controller support

https://www.rewasd.com/community/config/beyond-good-and-evil-pc-controller-settings/ed77c5e9b1d015dfe25f0de9f96a1851

Emulated Game cube version on Dolphin

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Beyond_Good_%26_Evil

I subscribe to the theory that Ubisoft were tinkering on a space game on their own and then the vivendi takeover suddenly came very close and they felt like they had to do something big to ward this off. This would have a severe impact on the company, so Yves asked his good friend Michel Ancel for a favor. Eventhough Ancel just started an entirely new company and was working on their first game, a game they had already shown off to the public, it was important enough to shelve Wild and get back at Ubisoft to turn this space game into something that could be called Beyond Good and Evil 2. Or at least signal to the audience that this was a genuine BGaE game. Ancel went on stage, BGaE2 was a big surprise at e3 and the stock prize went up.

Afterwards, Vivendi sold the shares they spent €794 million on for a cool €2 billion. The Guillemot family increased their stake in the company and Ubisoft found new investors in the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Tencent. Mission accomplished.

I loved the first game, and while i wasn't necessarily screaming for a sequel i'd happily play it, but the trailer really put me off with how incredibly cringe it was.
I'm still up for playing a good game swearing monkey or not, but i can imagine the current situation with the company and the world could affect or even cancel development.
I haven't thought about the game in what feels like years, a good PC port of the original would be very welcome.

Bonus fact: Bloodywood made a song for the game, but it Ubi decided they didn't want it.

Ubisoft obviously doesn't care about Beyond Good and Evil. They may eventually make BG&E 2 because there is clearly still fan desire, but the fact that they keep announcing it and then not actually making it shows the priority level.

I actually think the Netflix adaptation is a positive because it might drive up interest in the property or even be timed for a release alongside the next game. Even though BG&E was a critically acclaimed game, it's 15 years old at this point and it was not a hit upon release, so it's hard to imagine the sequel being a big priority without something to drive interest (like a popular Netflix show.)

You could tell they didn't that much when they showed it last time and it looked like a totally different series basically and they said "we're letting the community develop content for this" lol.

Ubisoft is past thier golden age and in a creative rut, imo. Even if they did take BGE 2 seriously, would you really want this version of ubisoft to make it?

@noobsauce: Ubisoft is not one developer, it's a huge umbrella of developers. The game could be made by an outside company headed by Ancel or by one of Ubisoft's more creative studios.

I think Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is one of the most creative and interesting games Ubisoft has made and that was only a few years ago. Ubisoft is not just a factory churning out Far Cries and Assassin's Creeds, though it's mostly that.

The question we should be asking is do enough people care about Beyond Good and Evil 2?

I mean.. I loved BG&E but I'm kinda whatever now. That was how long ago?

If they finally get that new one out fantastic I'll play it but I'm well beyond actively waiting for one.

@bigsocrates: It’s an umbrella of developers, but they seem to operate within a pretty consistent range in the past 5-10 years due to their “editorial team” (or whatever it’s called) having pretty broad powers to curate their games to have a similar feel. They’re pretty much a Far Cry/Assassin’s Creed/Just Dance/Watch Dogs factory.

Agreed that they occasionally do something weird. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is surprisingly good, though I imagine that pitch got through because it’s brand synergy and I honestly don’t think the budget was particularly high on that one (compared with most other Ubi $60 games). I assume that whole game was a low financial risk for them, since I think it was made kinda cheaply and it’s a near-launch Mario game on a Nintendo platform so it basically had to do fine for them.

Before that game, there was that brief 2-year window around 2015 from Ubi where they made Grow Home, Child of Light, Valiant Hearts, and Grow Up (and I guess I’ll throw in those Assassin’s Creed Chronicles games that were side scrollers). That seemed promising, but I feel like whatever that internal initiative was where they decided they would make $15-$20 games has long since ended. Maybe all those game barely broke even.

Anyway, it always seemed crazy to me that they would make another BG&E, a game that would need to have a big budget to be consistent with the scope of the first game. Like they gave it a shot once and the project was a financial loss from the sounds of it, and since then Ubi just seems more focused on releasing games that have a pretty broad, generic appeal. Maybe they could figure out how to market BG&E better this time around, but I just can’t imagine modern Ubi being interested in the project at all.

@jesus_phish: I think this too.

If you wish another example of Ubisoft don't caring about something, check how they handle the Might and Magic franchise. While the first game under their umbrella (HOMM V), got support for a long time, later games never had that. Ubisoft often pull the plug cut support fast as they can, don't appear to give time or resources for new games. Even when they got something right, like the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Might and Magic X or that puzzle game, they never did that again. They did a ton of mobile games, which none appear to last for long.

There was a brief period where beyond good and evil and sands of time released where I thought to myself ubisoft was a company I needed to pay attention to and they have been working hard to disabuse me of that opinion ever since.