Speaking to Edge, Ubisoft's Michel Ancel has commented on the importance of emotional resonance and giving players the freedom to discover in Beyond Good & Evil 2.
While Ancel could not go into specifics about the highly anticipated title, he said that he hopes to create moments in the game that will stay with people forever.
“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. 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.”
Beyond Good & Evil 2 was announced in 2008 but since then Ubisoft has remained quiet on the game as Ancel and his team turned their attention to Rayman Origins and Legends. With both of those games now complete, the latter launches on PS4 and Xbox One later this month, Ancel says:
“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. 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.“
Ancel also encouraged developers to pursue a wider diversity of graphic options and art styles in games rather than pushing for photorealism.
“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. 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.”
In July of last year, Ancel said that an announcement regarding the sequel was possible within a year, possibly pointing to E3 in June. Ubisoft has confirmed that two major unannounced games are coming within the next fiscal year, which begins on April 1st, and while one of them will almost certainly be a new Assassin's Creed, the other might be Beyond Good & Evil 2.
Ubisoft has however previously called the original Beyond Good & Evil, which launched in 2003 and was re-released for PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2011, a "mistake."
You can read Ancel's full interview when the next edition of Edge goes on sale this Thursday.
