Beyond Good and Evil 2

The original Beyond Good & Evil, released in 2003, was critically praised and gained a cult following, but was considered a commercial failure. Ancel explained that as he wrote out the game's universe, he found it was bigger than what he could practically include within a single game, and thus anticipated the game to be the first of a trilogy of works. However, the poor sales of this game left its publisher Ubisoft reluctant to invest in a sequel.[10]

A screenshot from the May 2008 teaser trailer, showing Pey'j in the foreground

Rumors about a sequel began to circulate around 2007, starting with a Nintendo Power interview with Ancel who stated he was working on a new project that was very personal to him, and mentioned his hopes to reuse Jade, the player-character from Beyond Good & Evil, in a future project without changing her personality.[11] Ancel said in a May 2008 interview with the French magazine Jeuxvideo.fr that the Beyond Good & Evil sequel had been in pre-production for a year, but was yet to be approved by Ubisoft.[12] Later that month, as part of their "Ubidays" event, Ubisoft released a trailer for the next, yet-named project from Ancel and their Ubisoft Montpellier studio, which had worked on Beyond Good & Evil. The trailer used Beyond Good & Evil music assets and showed characters that appeared to be Jade and Pey'j from the original Beyond Good & Evil. Ubisoft reported that the trailer had all been recorded within the game engine, showcasing high-resolution graphics representative of seventh generation consoles capabilities.[13][14] A second, leaked trailer appeared for the game on the Internet around May 2009, showing a character that appeared to be Jade running through a crowded street. The trailer was confirmed to be authentic by Ancel, while Ubisoft denied that they had purposely released the footage.[15][16][17]

Since these trailers, up until 2016, the state of progress with Beyond Good and Evil 2 was unclear, with conflicting statements made by both Ubisoft and Ancel. While Ancel and Ubisoft reported several times that the game was still in development, rumors circulated that Ubisoft had put the game on hold,[18][19][20][21] that Ubisoft had yet to officially announce the title and thus production was not officially started,[22][23][24] and that Ancel had left Ubisoft Montpellier,[25][26] By 2016, Ancel affirmed that they had put aside work on Beyond Good and Evil 2 to develop Rayman Legends (2013) which enabled them to produce tools that would help with the production of Beyond Good and Evil 2; once work for Rayman Legends was completed, they returned to Beyond Good & Evil's sequel.[27][28] Ubisoft later noted Ancel's time was split between Beyond Good and Evil 2 and Wild, a title developed by Ancel's Wild Sheep Studios outside of Ubisoft.[29]

In late 2016, Ancel used social media to post images from the game, showing a younger Pey'j, hinting that Beyond Good and Evil 2 may be a prequel. Ubisoft shortly followed by officially announcing the game.[30][31][32] Ubisoft showed the first new trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2 during their E3 2017 conference and was announced as a prequel to the first game.[33] During E3 2017, Ancel confirmed that the 2008 and 2009 trailers were from initial work as a narrative sequel to Beyond Good & Evil, but during development they opted to change direction and make it a prequel, and thus the work previously shown was from an effectively different game.[4]

A screenshot from the May 2009 leaked trailer showing Jade being pursued through an urban setting in a third-person perspective

The platforms for release have not been announced. There had been rumors that it would have been released as a timed exclusive for the Nintendo Switch (under its codename NX) in the prior year,[34] but Ancel confirmed this was not the case. The "Space Monkey Program" lists the game for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, however Michel Ancel stated that the platforms have not been announced yet, and that the listing was due to a bug.[35][36] Ancel later told Kotaku that the game is designed to run on many platforms.[37]

Ancel announced his departure from Ubisoft in September 2020, and said that both Beyond Good and Evil 2 and Wild were in capable hands.[38] The French newspaper Libération, which had followed Ubisoft's problems with mid-2020 series of sexual misconduct allegations raised against many high-level members of the company, learned that members of Ancel's team found Ancel's leadership on the project to be unorganized and at times abusive, causing the game's development to have many restarts and accounting for the delay since its 2010 announcement. The Montpellier team had reported these concerns to leadership of Ubisoft as early as 2017 but Ancel's close relationship with Yves Guillemot prevented any major corrections to occur until the 2020 internal evaluations that led to Ancel's departure.[39] Ubisoft stated that Ancel "hasn't been directly involved in BG&E2 for some time now" when he left the company.[40]

In July 2021, Ubisoft stated in a financial report that development was "progressing well" but did not answer a question about its release date.[41] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development for a video game, at more than 15 years.[42] In July 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.[43]