The ESRB seems to have revealed that Ubisoft is planning a Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition. News on the BG&E front has been a little quiet as of late, so fans of the classic adventure title might be in for a nice revisit. That notoriously truant sequ—err, prequel, however? Well, who knows?
On August 31, X user MACOS380 posted a screenshot of the aforementioned ESRB rating for an apparent remaster of the beloved PS2-era game. The page describes the title (which they list with an “and” instead of an ampersand) as an “action-adventure game in which players assume the role of a reporter accompanied by a pig-like companion investigating a conspiracy on the planet of Hillys,” which sure sounds the part. Platforms listed include Windows, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series. There’s no mention of the Xbox One.
Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft for comment.
Combining third-person fighting, puzzles, and wildlife photography, Beyond Good & Evil has sustained interest ever since its 2003 release on PS3, Xbox, GameCube, and PC, despite the game failing to earn enough money to warrant an immediate followup. It received a digital HD remaster in 2011 on both Xbox 360 and PS3, and is possibly expected to see an additional game at some indeterminate point in the future. Maybe. It’s complicated.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is still AWOL
A followup to Beyond Good & Evil was first teased all the way back in 2008, by way of a cinematic trailer showing off spacey environments, a recognizable pig-like character, and someone very reminiscent of the first game’s protagonist, Jade. Some more footage of this project leaked out a year later, but things would go relatively quiet until 2016, when it seemed the sequel’s future was in doubt, shortly before solid confirmation from Ubisoft and a proper trailer at E3 (RIP) 2017. Series’ creator Michael Ancel said that instead of a direct sequel, the next game would in fact be a prequel and that the gameplay would be quite different from the original.
Like so much else in life, things then got more complicated.
Following a controversial announcement by a very excited Joseph Gordon Levitt at E3 2018 that the game would use crowdsourced art and music via the actor’s HitRecord platform, to create content for a game produced by a big-budget AAA game publisher, reports of toxic work environments at Ubisoft, including sexual harassment and abusive behavior broke. The fallout saw Beyond Good and Evil 2’s director leave the company. Managing director Guillaume Carmona would also leave for similar reasons as the game-in-progress broke records for being one of the longest development periods for an unreleased game.
Still, Ubisoft insisted that Beyond Good and Evil 2 was still in production as recently as January of 2023. This past July, however, saw BGE2’s creative director, Emile Morel, unexpectedly pass away.