Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a game that’s been in the making for about 10 years. That’s not 10 years of continuous development mind you, but rather how long the rumors of its existence have been floating about. So when fans got to see actual in-game footage of this long-fabled project at E3 2018, it was kind of  like a dream come true in a way. That said it was a version of that dream that really didn’t offer much by way of explanation, we saw ships and characters flying around, but we weren’t told anything about waht we could expect to do in this game. That’s finally changed though, as Ubisoft has released a couple of videos laying out exactly what the vision for Beyond Good and Evil 2 is.

(short version)

(long version)

It definitely sounds ambitious and will definitely be something special if they manage to pull it off, but I wonder if this is really what everyone had been hoping to see in a Beyond Good and Evil sequel. Having a whole universe to explore sounds cool, but we’ve heard that claim a couple of times before, and it doesn’t usually work out very well.

Beyond the obvious danger of spreading its story too thin, this game sounds like the opposite of what Beyond Good and Evil was. Instead of a tight and focused story centered around a handful of locations and a unusual-but-compelling gameplay loop, we’ve got literally an entire galaxy to explore and a swath of gameplay options to choose from. Furthermore, space and aimless exploration wasn’t what Beyond Good and Evil was about. Exploration was done with a purpose: exposing the corrupt Alpha Sections as the invaders they were, and space only factored into things at the very end. Huh…

It’s great that the team behind this has a vision they’re pursuing and the passion to mold it into something cool, but I don’t know. This might very well be a great game once it’s eventually released, but I don’t think it’ll ever really be Beyond Good and Evil to me.

What’s your take on Beyond Good and Evil 2? Excited? Worried? Perhaps even perplexed?