Rayman designer Michel Ancel of France-based Ubisoft Montpellier spoke about the much anticipated Beyond Good & Evil 2 , the sequel to the cult videogame Beyond Good & Evil , in a wide-ranging interview with Edge for its next upcoming magazine.
Though Ancel didn’t go into any specifics of Beyond Good & Evil 2 , he did suggest that the sequel will aim to fulfil a long-held ambition: to try to “make moments memorable and [imbue them] with strong consequences,” a fulfilment in which Ancel feels he or the majority of videogames industry at large hasn’t achieved yet.
“I think there are some very memorable moments in games, and in the one I’m working on we try to make moments memorable and [imbue them] with strong consequences,” Ancel explained to Edge. “It’s not only about a single moment, but the whole journey that the player is led through in the world. In Beyond Good & Evil , we tried to make the player travel and discover different things, and I think it’s something that you really need… It’s like in a good story, or a good book, or a good movie: the whole book is supposed to bring you to this special moment. It’s meant to make you feel something very strong, even if it’s short. It’s something that we haven’t achieved yet [in the game industry]. I have the idea to build this kind of thing, but honestly, it’s something that we need to work on.
When we did Beyond Good & Evil , we really wanted to make something different, even if it’s in the style of a classic action-adventure game, and make a real experience game,” Ancel continued. “I think that it’s a game that people are still discovering, and maybe these kinds of games still have a place. We’re all waiting for games like The Last Guardian , after all.”
Development of Beyond Good & Evil 2 was vastly unknown for the most part, until a teaser trailer was revealed in late May, 2008. Development of the title was still ongoing even two years later, when Ancel announced that the game would take “a while” during 2010’s Montpellier in Game conference. In 2011, it was revealed that development of Beyond Good & Evil 2 was put on hold so that Ancel and his team could work on Rayman Legends . An HD re-release of the original Beyond Good & Evil was released on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network in the same year. Even though development for Beyond Good & Evil 2 is picking up speed, a lot of specifics on the game are still unknown.
In an exclusive Ubisoft dinner during 2011, however, Ancel revealed that Beyond Good & Evil 2 would skip current-gen consoles in favor of targeting next-gen consoles. Now that we’re three years into the future, you can anticipate Beyond Good & Evil 2 to drop on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U. However, that doesn’t mean that graphical fidelity will play much importance in Beyond Good & Evil 2’s visuals, as it was downplayed by Ancel during the interview with Edge. Instead, focus will be placed on exploring means of keeping the game exciting and interesting for players to get into.
“We know how to take care with design better than before, but now the next step is to move away a little bit from the graphics,” Ancel explained. “We know how to make games, but we need to work on how to make them really exciting and mysterious at the same time. We’ve made games with big cinematics and expensive sequences, and we’ve tried to make the games for millions of people. Now there are other explorations that we need to do.”
Because of the original Beyond Good & Evil’s commercial failure, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is being developed to cater to a much larger audience of next-gen players, but there’s no intent on making the game more casual-oriented. There is no release date for Beyond Good & Evil 2 at this time.