Beyond Good & Evil 2 Has Not Been Canceled
Ubisoft's reassurances despite everything
Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still alive – or so Ubisoft claims. The game was first announced way back in 2008 with a CGI teaser, but since then, so much water has passed under the bridge that one or two oceans could have dried up, and the project has always struggled to ride the waves.
Lately, as we know, Ubisoft is going through a complex and delicate phase of corporate reorganization: several projects, including the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, have been canceled, and many naturally assumed that BG&E2 had also ended up in the shredder.
Apparently, this is not the case, or at least this is what a Ubisoft spokesperson stated to Kotaku in response to a specific question: "Beyond Good & Evil will be part of the Creative House 4 division, dedicated to immersive fantasy worlds and narrative universes. Beyond Good & Evil 2 remains a priority for us in the context of our strategy focused on Open World adventures."
Beyond Good & Evil 2: 20 Years in the Making
The teaser-trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2 naturally followed the success of the first BG&E, initially released on PS2 in 2003: Ubisoft recently created the 20th Anniversary Edition of this original masterpiece, which we naturally Reviewed.
The first teaser showed two of the game's main characters, the pig-like Pey'j and, from behind, the protagonist Jade, implying that the game would be a direct sequel to the first adventure, whose story [we'll give you a micro-spoiler] ended leaving many questions unanswered and whose post-credits scene concluded with a true cliffhanger.
The project, initially led by Michel Ancel himself, who had created the first chapter, then disappeared from the radar; Ancel left Ubisoft and attempted independent development, only to be re-hired by the publisher and present Beyond Good & Evil 2 again in 2017, this time with the premise of a prequel. In 2020, Ancel left Ubisoft again, and the project passed first into the hands of Guillaume Brunier and then into those of Francis Coldeboeuf at the beginning of 2024. Meanwhile, in 2023, Creative Director Emile Morel passed away, a role later assumed by Fawzi Mesmar.
Between one change and another, however, over 8 years have already passed since Beyond Good & Evil 2 last showed itself – with the exception of the game references Ubisoft included in the aforementioned 20th-anniversary edition of BG&E – and in similar situations, the perplexity among fans naturally grows immensely.
We'll have to wait and see...