Beyond Good & Evil fans hoping that they would finally get to play its sequel this year are going to be disappointed again, as Ubisoft has confirmed that Beyond Good & Evil 2 isn’t coming out in 2020. Recently, Ubisoft announced five AAA games scheduled for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, and Beyond Good & Evil 2 didn’t make the cut.
Going back to the first game’s release, director Michel Ancel said that he always planned for Beyond Good & Evil to be a trilogy. He’s gone on the record saying that a second game was in development as early as 2008, but work on the current iteration of Beyond Good & Evil 2 seemed to start in 2016, when concept art and rumors about platform exclusivity started making the rounds. The game finally made its debut with a flashy cinematic trailer at E3 2017, and another trailer at E3 2018 showed a bit more about the world of Beyond Good & Evil 2, including the return of Jade, the protagonist of the original game. Since then, Ubisoft has mostly gone quiet about the game, showing little of it publicly and not delivering on the Beyond Good & Evil 2 beta that was once planned for 2019.
After not saying much about the game for a while, Ubisoft recently piped up about its progress, but only to say that it won’t be out this year. As Gamesindustry.biz reports, Ubisoft was asked in an earnings call whether Beyond Good & Evil was among the five AAA games planned for this fiscal year, and CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed that it isn’t on the schedule. Despite not coming out this year, it seems like Ubisoft is still hard at work on the anticipated sequel. As recently as October 2019, Ubisoft has been sharing updates on Beyond Good & Evil 2’s progress on its YouTube page.
While players won’t get the chance to play Beyond Good & Evil 2 until next year at the earliest, Ubisoft still plans to deliver a lot of interesting titles this year. Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Watch Dogs Legion are all set to come out before next April, when the next fiscal year begins. It also has two more games on the way, which are expected to be the next Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games.
With new entries in several of Ubisoft’s biggest franchises coming out this year, 2021 could leave the publisher with a gap in its schedule big enough to finally fit Beyond Good & Evil 2. That would put its release roughly five years after production began, which is a pretty reasonable estimate for a AAA title from a studio like Ubisoft. If 2021 is actually going to be the year of Beyond Good & Evil 2, it shouldn’t be long before Ubisoft finally starts showing more than brief glimpses of how it’s shaping up
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Source: Gamesindustry.biz