The weekend has been filled with some impressive announcements and new trailers, but today could be a big one as well.
Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming claims that Ubisoft has a Beyond Good & Evil 2 trailer, that they have been sitting on for a year now. Now he suggests that Ubisoft could be showing that trailer in today’s Ubisoft Forward event, coming in a few hours.
Beyond Good & Evil 2 is in the running alongside Duke Nukem Forever and Star Citizen as one of the older projects that stayed in development until it released. This would not be a situation like Metroid Dread, where the original producer, Yoshio Sakamoto, sat on his idea for nearly two decades until the tech needed to tell his story was ready on the Switch.
It’s no secret that Ubisoft’s Michel Ancel revealed his team started work on Beyond Good & Evil 2 all the way back in 2008. And, we know that Ubisoft had picked up and dropped the project in over a decade since then. And yes, it was no accident that we brought up Metroid Dread above, because Sakamoto made the decision to sit on his ideas for Metroid Dread in the console generation of 2008, when Nintendo’s portable was the DS.
We also reported on rumors last month that Ubisoft was unwilling to cancel the game, in a situation very similar to the one they faced making Skull and Bones. If those rumors were true, Ubisoft’s Guillemot family is looking to sell the company, and Beyond Good & Evil 2 is seen as an asset in their books so long as it remains in development.
Unfortunately, those rumors do bring back to the surface the controversies Ubisoft faced in the last few years, of a toxic workplace culture with poor working conditions and an undercurrent of harassment. It’s also unfortunate that this is relevant to this story, because Ancel himself was accused of this toxic behavior, by the people who were making Beyond Good & Evil 2 under his leadership.
Ancel left the project as well as Ubisoft and the video game industry years ago, so he no longer has any involvement in whatever current state Beyond Good & Evil 2 is in now. But if a trailer has been waiting for a while, maybe the truth is that Ubisoft is just about ready to release this game.
And maybe without Ancel’s guidance, Beyond Good & Evil 2 has not turned out well. But just like Duke Nukem Forever, fans will appreciate the closure of just getting the game in their hands, if it isn’t possible to rescue the project anymore.
