Michel Ancel, Game Designer behind the Rayman franchise and the pre-historic survival game Wild, has stressed that Beyond Good & Evil 2 represents a “very serious” development project for Ubisoft.
Word comes by way of Kotaku, who quizzed the decorated developer about the long-gestating sequel. First announced back in 2008, Beyond Good & Evil 2 essentially fell off the radar soon after it was unveiled, only to surface via Ancel’s Instagram feed two months ago with some intriguing concept art to boot (see above). More than anything, those photos represented a statement of intent from Ancel and Co., after the dev revealed to Kotaku that the cryptic artwork “was not a gimmick but a way to say ‘Look. The game exists and we can do it.'”
As for why development has taken so long, Michel Ancel conceded that during pre-production on Beyond Good & Evil 2, the team found themselves limited by technology, but not anymore.
“[We had] big questions that are so big you can’t know the answers because no physics engine can handle all of the dimensions and speeds and things like that. It’s like ‘Okay, if no physics engine can do it, how can we achieve that?’ It’s crazy and difficult to explain to people how technical making a game is. Now it’s not anymore about polygons and things like that, it’s about millions of behavioural AIs, systems, and giant spaceships crashing on big planets.”
Beyond Good & Evil 2 continues to truck along in development, almost a decade after it was first unveiled. Don’t expect to learn too much about Ubisoft’s follow-up anytime soon, but rest assured that Ancel’s project is finally starting to come together.
