Michel Ancel on the Beyond Good & Evil 2 art teases, been in the works since Rayman Legends, ambitious plans
After speculation began that Beyond Good & Evil 2 being in development for Switch surfaced earlier in the year, Ubisoft finally confirmed that the game is happening. Series creator Michel Ancel began to tease the news by sharing various pieces of art created for the project. When asked about why he did that by Kotaku at Indiecade Europe, Ancel explained: “That was not a gimmick but a way to say ‘Look. The game exists and we can do it.'”
Interestingly, Beyond Good & Evil 2 has been in the works since Rayman Legends shipped. But unfortunately, it won’t be complete any time soon. Ancel noted that it needs to be “more concrete” before a proper reveal, but it’s “a very serious development for Ubisoft.”
So why has Beyond Good & Evil 2 taken so long to develop? The primary aspect to point to is technology not being up to snuff until recently, especially with Ancel wanting to focus on travelling in space.
“Even on Beyond Good and Evil 1 it was supposed to have space travel and all these things but we were limited. The big thing that is really cool is that the consoles are now so powerful […] The amount of memory the CPU has, you can do those things now. It’s not ‘Oh, we will never do it.’ It’s working.”
“I’ve been working on [Beyond Good and Evil 2] for a long time, on the technologies that allow you to create those kinds of games – tools to draw the big planets and things like that. We’re confident on the quality and that we can achieve that kind of game.”
“[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.”
