Remember the last time you heard from Ubisoft about Beyond Good & Evil 2? Our last report on it has actually been just two months ago. We won’t blame you if it has felt longer than that for you.
It turns out it’s been over two months now that the game has outlasted Duke Nukem Forever as the most delayed major video game since announcement. It took Duke Nukem Forever 5,156 days to finish development from the date of its announcement and release. As of this writing, it has been 5,238 days since the game’s 2008 reveal, not in a media event, but a simple interview with game creator Michel Ancel.
Of course, this can all be relative to the eye of the beholder. Metroid Dread producer Yoshio Sakamoto revealed that he had the idea for the game as far back as 2002, and had tried to make it as early as 2005. With its eventual production and release actually happening last year, that’s arguably a 16 to 19 year wait for the next major Metroid game. Of course, given that 2005 project was essentially cancelled, and Yoshio started work from scratch with Spanish game studio MercurySteam in the same year it would actually release, many people would say this doesn’t really count.
At least Yoshio can say he held off on making Metroid Dread until Nintendo had a platform that could realize his vision for the game. Beyond Good & Evil 2 has had an even more troubled development history, making it more fitting to compare to Duke Nukem Forever indeed.
While the announcement arguably goes back to 2008, the game as we know it was not officially unveiled until E3 2017. While the original Beyond Good & Evil was a modestly ambitious single player action adventure starring a plucky investigative journalist named Jade, Beyond Good & Evil 2 was revealed to the shock of many fans to be a prequel that will not feature Jade at all, but instead be a broader adventure with a confirmed create-a-character system.
Jumping forward to 2020, Michel Ancel leaves Ubisoft. The company makes the surprise revelation that Ancel had not been working on Beyond Good & Evil 2 for some time already. Under his tenure, the project was started over several times, and this was the main factor behind its extended delay.
While the revelations behind it’s delay have nearly been all bad, at least Ubisoft did what 3DRealms was unwilling to do, when they allowed Duke Nukem Forever producer George Broussard to extend development to unreasonable degrees, to the point that the company lost most of its fortune from the original Duke Nukem games, and it would eventually have to be sold to Gearbox before the project would actually be labeled finished and finally published.
Now, Beyond Good & Evil 2 hasn’t replaced Duke Nukem Forever on the official Guinness Book of World Records quite yet. It’s possible that Guinness has some technical rule that disqualifies Beyond Good & Evil 2, or perhaps more simply, they hadn’t gotten around to checking on it.
If that technicality is that Beyond Good & Evil 2 hasn’t been released yet, we may be waiting a little bit longer before the game actually gets officially recognized. For Beyond Good & Evil fans, that day can’t come soon enough.
Source: Destructoid
