When is the Beyond Good and Evil 2 release date? Beyond Good and Evil 2 was originally announced back in 2009 before it disappeared for a number of years. But at E3 2017, it made a surprise return with an impressive cinematic trailer during Ubisoft’s press conference. Here’s the thing: we’ve barely seen anything about the game since. So what’s going on?
Much has changed about the project since Beyond Good and Evil 2 was first announced. Former creative director Michel Ancel left Ubisoft in 2020 to spend time on a wildlife sanctuary, and while the team he leaves behind continues with the development of the action game, it’s without his influence. As such, there’s no telling just when and in what state we’ll see Beyond Good and Evil 2 next. Below, you’ll find all the information we have on this upcoming game so far.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 release date estimate
We expect that Beyond Good and Evil won’t be released until 2025 or beyond. Ubisoft has been reluctant to share a release window and states it is “just not there yet”.
There’s no release date or even any release platforms announced for Beyond Good and Evil 2 yet. However, there were suggestions about the Beyond Good and Evil 2 PC release from one of the game’s webpages that it would be coming to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. But that could also simply be target platforms for now and, as such, are likely to change.
With the move to current-gen consoles, though, this has likely changed to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. During an investor call in July 2021, Ubisoft’s chief financial officer shared that the team is “progressing well” with the game but that it was still “too early” to explain any further.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 trailers
Premiering at E3 2017, we are introduced to Knox, a monkey who performs a heist to get a data disc off a character we later find out is called Zhou Yuzhu. Knox flees the scene along with his friend Shani as they evade the police. Returning home, Knox flings the disc over to Dakini, who examines its contents with awe.
Many details about the setting were then revealed over the next few years. The world Ancel invented for Beyond Good and Evil is so large that he originally planned for the series to be a trilogy in order to explore it all. We’ve only seen a small portion of it with the first game, but this prequel will show us much more, not least because it’s planned as a huge, open world this time around.
One of the defining features of the Beyond Good and Evil universe is that it’s set far into the future when humans and other civilizations have spread into space and colonized other solar systems. While there are typical sci-fi elements such as aliens and advanced artificial intelligence, its most distinctive feature is that humans coexist with anthropomorphic animals. In the first game, Jade’s “uncle” is a large pig-man called Pey’j, for instance.
While the prequel is based in the same universe as Beyond Good and Evil, it does not necessarily include the same locations and, in fact, is likely set very far away. Specifically, it takes place in System 3, which is described as a “multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, human society in a distant solar system.” This newly colonized area has since become a hub of interstellar trade in the Milky Way, with private corporations having it as their base of operations.
A second trailer shows our heroes traveling across a snowfield in the pirate ship Gada when they suddenly come under attack. We do finally see some very familiar faces here, such as Pey’j cooking up a storm in the kitchen and a gloomy-looking Jade who seems to have aligned herself with the bad guys.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 gameplay
We’ve so far only seen the above trailer when it comes to actual gameplay footage. It includes sequences of riding a hoverbike, a little bit about combat, and the spyglass – a device that reveals combat skills your enemies and potential new allies have.
When you start playing Beyond Good and Evil 2, you’re cast to the very bottom of society. You’ll have no crew and hardly any resources with which to have any influence over the world. The idea is to explore the world, trading in goods, completing missions, and plundering all you can get without getting caught, all in order to progress from those small beginnings to become an all-powerful space pirate.
The rest remains a bit of a mystery, but we’re certain that you’ll meet up with the crew of the Gada and be able to join them for larger adventures on different planets, discovering new cultures and getting lost in all types of spectacular architecture and environments.
“You can imagine that all these guys are people you met during the adventure, and then they join your crew, and they help you manage this huge spaceship,” Ancel says. “So you need a crew, which means that you need exploration to create a crew, to have a bigger ship, more exploration, more investigations… there’s a lot to discover, lots of challenges and sub-quests.”
Beyond Good and Evil 2 will also have online functionality with drop-in drop-out co-op. Ubisoft claims that “you can play alone or with friends; everyone will take part in the intense action and drama found through System 3’s planets, moons, and space.”
Beyond Good and Evil 2 technology
The team began working on the technology that will power Beyond Good and Evil 2 three years ago. It started out as a solar system simulator, and now the team is building the game inside of it. One of the big advantages of this technology is that planets orbit stars, and, as they do, the sunlight cast upon planets is affected.
“When you see the sunset, it’s not just colors; it’s the real sun going into this position,” Ancel says. “If you know what a sunset is, a sunset is a modification of the color of the sun depending on the angle of the atmosphere.” Ancel demonstrated this during E3 by pulling the camera out from a character on a planet until it was far away in outer space.
“You can see that that city is just a little part of a huge world,” Ancel says. “You see that we are just on top of a gigantic planet, which is, in fact, a little satellite of a bigger planet, with cities and the dark. And there is a simulation of the universe, where everything is rotating in a classical way, so if you change the time, you see the rotation.”
As the team is working on such a huge scale – from millimeter precise details up to global panoramas – they’re using a mix of hand-crafted design and procedural generation to pull it off.
“Cities can grow by themselves, they can be destroyed, they can connect to others,” Ancel says. “Everything is alive; in fact, it’s not pre-scripted. So it’s a balance. We can say, ‘This part of the planet has those kinds of resources,’ and depending on those things, kind of emergent things… today, we can hand-craft everything, or we can decide to have a kind of robot that is going to calculate the history of the planet.
“Even we don’t know exactly what’s on this planet. We know there are things, but we don’t know exactly where they are; we don’t know exactly what it is,” he adds.
The galaxy is filled with systems that all link together. For example, asteroids can crash into planets and actively deform the terrain. The crash won’t just affect the shape of the land, though; corporations in the cities will send slaves to mine the asteroids for raw materials, contributing to the living cycle of the planet and its societies.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 development
It’s been a very long time since Beyond Good and Evil 2 was properly re-announced, and since then, Ubisoft has brought players into the development process, acquiring feedback and suggestions via the Space Monkey Program.
“It can be the controls, it can be the decisions, the online system, the trading system, all these things,” Ancel says. “It’s a way to experience people getting their feedback on the gameplay side, but also showing concept art, asking people for their own ideas or experience, traveling, whatever. I think they learn what they travel because that is the theme of the game: you travel, you discover cultures. And you take that, and you are richer because of this travel.”
Since then, though, word about the game has shriveled up. Ancel left game development entirely, and the project has continued in his absence. However, the last we heard about anything related to Beyond Good and Evil 2 was a job listing in 2023 for a senior concept artist. It doesn’t say much about the role other than the game’s still actively being developed.
Even though it’s clearly had a rough time in the oven, we’ll let you know as soon as we hear about any hint of Beyond Good and Evil 2 release date. If you’re tired of waiting, why not take a look at some of the best adventure games to get stuck into right now? As for games that stand a chance of coming out this century, here’s a list of the upcoming PC games in 2024.