When Beyond Good and Evil 2 was first announced over four years ago, fans of the original cult classic were ecstatic to finally be getting the follow-up they’d been hoping for for years, but that announcement, in hindsight, has been more of a source of pain than glee for those fans. Updates on the long-in-development game have dried up almost entirely over the last couple of years, and even though Ubisoft insists that production is proceeding well, from an outside perspective, things haven’t looked great for the game.
And it seems things haven’t looked great on the inside either, not that that comes as much of a surprise. Industry insider Tom Henderson recently took to Twitter to share details about the project and its development, saying that the game is “suffering a development crisis” due to a lack of creative direction, an issue that was only exacerbated when creative director Michel Ancel left Ubisoft over a year ago.
According to Henderson, Beyond Good and Evil 2 doesn’t fit with the plans and ambitious Ubisoft has for its future products, which have been putting an increasing emphasis on live service models and free-to-play experiences. Henderson claims that even though development on the game is still progressing, some of its developers believe that it is only “a matter of time” before Ubisoft ends up cancelling it.
Whether or not that does happen remains to be seen, but reports of the game’s development being in trouble don’t exactly come as much of a surprise at this point. Beyond Good and Evil 2 isn’t the only major upcoming release at Ubisoft that has had a long and protracted (and tortured) development cycle, with Skull and Bones also having been through the wringer. Read more on that through here.