Child of Light was a one of a kind type of game. It was a fantasy RPG/platformer with an ATB battle system modeled after the older Final Fantasy titles, and had a unique art style in which the whole thing felt like a watercolor painting come to life. It released to critical acclaim, and we were told as early as 2014, the original year of the game’s release, that it did well enough to warrant a sequel. It seems, though, that unfortunately, that will not happen, as no sequel is likely planned or in development.

Sitting down with VGC, creative director of the first game Patrick Plourde said that at this time, Child of Light isn’t the type of game that Ubisoft is looking to make. While he has a clear idea of where he wants to go with the story, and even what the gameplay enhancements will be, it just doesn’t look likely to happen. He feels like that with such a heavy focus on the games-as-a-service model going forward, there’s not much room for that type of experience at the company right now.

“I don’t think it’s the type of game that Ubisoft wants to make,” said Plourde. “The company is not an adolescent company, it is a mature company. And the other things, in terms of portfolio, it’s still supported – we ported it on Switch and we’re still selling a bunch of copies, but it’s just that right now it’s all about games as a service. We can make money out of it, but you can make more money elsewhere. That’s the problem of not being independent while making this.”

Of course, stranger things have happened. 2003’s Beyond Good and Evil was one of the company’s most infamous flops, yet it’s on course to get a full-fledged, and what appears to be very high budget, sequel, so Child of Light’s day may come once again.

In 2010, Ubisoft unveiled the UbiArt Frameworks Engine. It helped to produce many well regarded games, such as Child of Light, Valiant Hearts, Rayman Origins, and Rayman Legends. All of those were universally acclaimed and noted for their distinct and vivid art style. But there’s been a noticeable lack of games over the last few years using the engine, and Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, revealed why that is the case, in an interview with IGN Unfiltered (you can see the full, near hour long interview below).

According to him, it really is a simple cause of the engine being harder to work with it than Ubisoft had intended. Developers struggled because “the tools were difficult to use.” Guillemot confirms that “at one point we wanted to give them to everybody [in Ubisoft]”. That, however, obviously didn’t pan out, and only a handful of studios have managed to get use from the engine, and mostly on smaller scale projects, as noted above.

The engine isn’t scrapped though, as Guillemot says there will be more to see from it in the future, but it doesn’t paint a good picture of how much use it’ll see going forward.

Interestingly, the team behind Far Cry 3 is working on Child of Light, which follows the tale of Aurora who’s been stolen from her house and must complete an epic quest to return the sun, moon and stars which the Queen of the Night is holding captive. She’ll be helped out by various allies and Igniculus, a firefly who guides. In case you’re wondering, yes, this is a coming of age story. And yes, it looks that good.

Child of Light will be releasing in 2014 for PS3, PS4, PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Wii U. Stay tuned for more details.

Speaking about visiting visual effects studio Weta Digital, which worked on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Ancel stated that, “We visited the studios in New Zealand. We discovered they were working closely with the programmers in order to avoid too much repetitive work done by humans. I think it’s very interesting to see how much you can integrate and put artificial intelligence in the tools so you can really order the computer to do things. It’s a very interesting way of working, to see where and how humans are involved in creation [and where the computer takes over].”

Ancel also confirmed that the same techniques could be used for Beyond Good & Evil 2. “Of course. There’s not so much difference between the two because, as soon as you start the process of sharing human [development] with the computer, you can translate that to more complex games. We have done research and it’s something we are working on, but I can’t mention too much about that.”

Could it be used to for larger-scale operations? “For sure, we’re doing research that could help even for bigger games. We believe we can achieve big games even with this size [of studio]; more could be done by the computer and we can focus on the really important things done by real people.

“The content and the quality of the content will be different. That’s something we’ve learned with our tools on Rayman Legends; in fact, those tools improve the quality. It was also funny to see how many people in the team can create content with the tools. Sometimes in [this business] you say, ‘Oh, this veteran is better than this young guy,’ but what if the veteran is only better at the technical things?

“When those two people are using tools that are easy to use, technical things don’t matter; it’s more the imagination and ideas that are very important. But we need to practise and use the tools, and now that Rayman Legends has been finished, we are going to move back onto triple-A games with those tools. I think it could be very interesting to talk about it in a year, and to see how far we’ve come.”

Now when will we be seeing Beyond Good & Evil 2? Lord knows, but at least it’s still in the domain of public discussion.