Michel Ancel, the designer behind Beyond Good & Evil and Rayman, recently sat down for a chat with fellow industry legend Tim Schafer as part of Double Fine’s “Devs Play” Youtube series. Ancel shares a lot of fascinating details about Beyond Good & Evil’s development, including one particularly bizarre story involving kidnapping, robbery, and public nudity.
If you’ve got any interest in how games get made, the whole video (embedded below) is well worth watching. But hey–I know you’re not looking for insight into the creative process or anything like that. You want Beyond Good & Evil 2, and you want it now.
Well, towards the end of the video (time stamp 1:07:45, if you insist on being precise), Schafer asks about the BG&E sequel. Ancel replies, “It’s difficult, because it’s hard for me to redo the same kind of game two times,” which is very much not a confirmation of the game’s existence, but is also pointedly not a denial of it.
The Beyond Good & Evil 2 trailer was released so long ago now that kids born afterwards are now able to hold basic conversations, but we still haven’t heard more than a rumor about the game since. In 2014, Ancel founded an indie company called Wild Sheep Studios, and is currently working on the positively trippy-looking survival adventure Wild. But Ancel is officially still working with Ubisoft on an unnamed title, described only as “extremely ambitious” and “close to the heart.”
So, hey, that’s not necessarily BG&E2, but it’s also not NOT BG&E2. Personally, I kind of hope that Ancel’s Ubisoft project is an original, unrelated game. I enjoyed Beyond Good & Evil as much as anyone, but it was great because it was fresh and original. A brand new game would hit that spirit better than a sequel ever could.
