The game, whose creator has long since stopped working for the French publisher, has resurfaced in a new job posting.

The game, which Ubisoft has already called an AAAA title, hasn’t been shown for several years now. Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in the works, as Ubisoft Barcelona has published a job advertisement on Twitter for a senior gameplay animator position. The studio wrote, “Take ownership of the quality of the animations and the functionality of the gameplay systems in one of the most ambitious Ubisoft projects to date.” Bloomberg reported back in February that Beyond Good & Evil 2 (from now on, we’ll abbreviate it to BG&E2) was still in the pre-production phase, after at least five years in development. It’s almost a disaster if that’s the case!

BG&E2’s life story is as chaotic as Duke Nukem Forever’s (and worse, if you think about it!) since Ubisoft first hinted at it with a trailer… back in 2008. That’s fourteen years ago. That’s how long it took for Duke to make his game a reality (the 2001 release, an incomplete version, was released on the internet, as we wrote about earlier).

Ubisoft didn’t say a word about Beyond Good & Evil 2 for almost a decade after that, and it was re-launched in 2017 by Yves Guillemot’s company. Then, the French publisher confirmed that it would be a prequel to Michel Ancel’s game (also known as Rayman’s creator). Then, in 2019, before E3, Ubisoft held a live broadcast of the game, which it did NOT do during that year’s video game event. An unnamed Ubisoft studio has joined the then-known five (Barcelona, Bordeaux, Mainz, Montpellier, Sofia) in development. And in August 2020, Netflix announced that a film adaptation of Beyond Good & Evil is in the works.

Then, in September 2020, as a result of the sexual harassment scandals at the French publisher, Ancel announced that he was leaving Ubisoft Montpellier to start his life anew with the wildlife. (And let’s not forget that WiLD, announced for PlayStation 4 in 2014 and perhaps still in production at Wild Sheep Studio, will continue without him…) Guillemot said at the end of 2020, “The world is fantastic – as you could see, Netflix also decided to take that universe to create a movie with it. So, there’s a lot of progress in that team, and the game is coming along very well.”

Just to ask quietly: has Ubisoft spent how much money on development so far?!

Source: VGC