Beyond Good & Evil 2 is reportedly still in pre-production, 18 years after its reveal

Still not in full production. Beyond Good & Evil 2 was first teased in 2008, but according to a new report from French outlet Origami, it still hasn’t left pre-production. As TheGamer and GamingBolt summarize it, at least 250 people at Ubisoft Montpellier are on the project, and the next goal is to get it into alpha.

What the report says:

• New direction: the game was long planned as a mostly online multiplayer game with many planets and a shared hub. It’s now single-player and story-first, with optional co-op and no need to stay online, per Twisted Voxel. The player hub is reportedly gone.
• Combat: sources compare the current combat direction to Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man games.
• The next gate: Ubisoft uses internal milestones called “gates” to decide whether a project gets more money and staff. BGE2’s next one is meant to lock its framework and move it into full production.
• Uncertainty: VGTimes reports that the old belief inside Ubisoft that BGE2 would never be cancelled has faded amid company-wide restructuring and layoffs, and staff are being told nobody knows what happens after the next milestone. That doesn’t mean Ubisoft has decided to cancel it.

One developer who has spent six years on the game told Origami that working out the root cause of its problems would take “an absolutely colossal postmortem,” as Twisted Voxel quotes. Ubisoft hasn’t commented, and there’s still no release date or confirmed platforms.

PPR take: 250 people is a big team for a game that hasn’t finished its own pitch. Dropping the always-online plan is the right call for a sequel to a story-driven 2003 cult classic. Now it has to get through the gate.