Beyond good and bad 2 – On the way to E3 2019

By Tom Marks

Beyond the great exciting games to watch at E3, Beyond Good and Evil 2 is strange. After multiple announcements and false starts dating back to 2008, with long periods of silence between them, this much-awaited sequel finally seems to be a real game that is really going on.

What's really funny is that the whole world had not understood anything about Beyond Good and Evil 2 before its surprise revelation at E3 2017 to a much greater knowledge than we could expect. These areas of mystery, leaks and rumors have now been replaced by tons of pre-alpha gameplay, live streams for developers and frequent updates on new features and development developments.

Seriously, that's about all they showed. If you are not aware, Ubisoft has already provided us with significant information on the combat and personalization of spaceships, information on increases, vehicles and coops, information about your crew, concept world art, demo demonstrations and at least four questions / answers about the live stream.

Frankly, it's an unprecedented limit of transparency for an AAA game of this magnitude. Developers like Ubisoft generally do not like to show the world an unfinished project. Once the film is out in the wild, that's what people will think of your game, no matter how much it changed by launching. You can specify that this is an alpha build as you see fit, but first impressions can often remain unchanged.

That's what makes it so refreshing what we've seen from Beyond Good and Evil 2. Although it's still hard to understand how all the raw parts presented will be collected, Ubisoft is open about it and constantly asks for feedback via its Space Monkey program. I appreciate this deluge of information and access even more because of the way the game's status was encrypted and closed at the time.

The project was virtually fully restarted from the old trailers that had initially teased it, moving from a simpler suite to an open-world sprawling multi-player space exploration game that was taking place before the events from the first Beyond Good and Evil. This is a huge change, and I wonder if he will keep or not what I liked about the original.

But that's a bit of the Beyond Good and Evil 2 trap: we've seen a lot, but we still know so little. Massive games like this take a lot of time to do, and Ubisoft has clearly invited the public to get in very early in the process of making it. I think the rules, and I certainly prefer that to the alternative of silence, but I'm starting to want a little more than alpha concepts and demos.

What I really want in Beyond Good and Evil 2 this year is for Ubisoft to show us a concrete slice of what this game really will be. I want them to show me the gameplay loop, show me what I'm going to do for hours, show me some details of the story, show me how the quests or progress will work – if there is even something this kind in the list. traditional meaning. I'm already excited about all the pieces of the puzzle I've seen, but I'd really like to take a look at the photo they'll eventually put together.

And although that's what I personally want, I'm not sure that's what we're going to get. It's more likely that we're seeing another cinematic trailer (ideally with a less-crypted look at the story) and another developers livestream to keep us informed of the evolution of things. Like it or not, Beyond Good and Evil 2 is probably still quite early in its development, relatively speaking. And although they have already shown a lot, I hope they will take the opportunity of the huge stage of E3 to present everything in a package a little more refined to people who have not followed it so near.

Ubisoft said it was preparing a playable beta by the end of 2019, but my instinct tells me that the final version of Beyond Good and Evil 2 is still a long way off. If Ubisoft has confirmed that it will not participate in the E3 itself, they will organize a broadcast stream for developers before the show on June 5, with new gameplay and new information. This seems like a good time to clarify his beta projects with more solid details, although I would be surprised that he is considering a real launch anytime before the end of 2020 at the earliest.

It's rare for you to get a major game that's both known and completely unpredictable, but Beyond Good and Evil 2 is clearly not like most games. So, if nothing else, we hope to at least see more space monkeys driving bikes. This is probably the most reliable E3 forecast of the year.

Tom Marks is the Associate Editor of Critics at IGN and the resident pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.