Beyond Good & Evil 2 Watch : Day 2,588

E3 this year was an event in which ALL the games that we had given up on ever seeing were all announced at once, at Sony’s Press Conference. Well, nearly all the games. We got The Last Guardian, and a Final Fantasy VII remake, AND, Shenmue III all in the same two hours. In fact, we got so much that we were never expecting that other games that we’re never expecting to actually ever play became noticeable by their absence.

It was May of 2008 when Ubisoft first announced that Beyond Good & Evil 2, was actually coming. Since then we’ve heard just short of nothing. The lack of any comment during Ubisoft’s own E3 press conference prompted The Guardian to ask CEO Yves Guillemot about the title directly. His response was far from a confirmation, but it wasn’t a denial either. To be exact he said

I can’t say the name, but there is a team working with Michel Ancel on a project that is… very interesting.

It’s an odd comment to make to be sure. On the one hand, it’s hardly unusual for developers to not speak about games that are still early in their development, but on the other hand the game was officially announced in 2008 so it’s not like they would be surprising anybody by telling us it was still being worked on. It would seem that the Ancel project is a BG&E follow up, he was the creator of the original after all, and it would be strange to mention him if it wasn’t. The only other possibility is that they don’t want to break the news that the project is dead until they have something “by the creator of” to replace it with, although that’s a bit of a stretch.

The original Beyond Good & Evil was released for the original X-box, Playstation 2, and Gamecube in 2003 and while it did not sell well upon it’s release it received very favorable reviews and has become a cult classic as gamers started to pick it up after the fact. An HD remaster was released for Xbox Live and the Playstation Network in 2011. The game followed the lead character Jade as she explored an alien world and uncovered a political conspiracy effecting the planet.

Since we learned this month that even the games we’ve given up on may still happen one day. We don’t expect this story is over yet. It’s only been a year longer than the time since The Last Guardian was first announced, after all.