Beyond Good and Evil 2 game developers talk E3 2017’s best surprise
Beyond Good and Evil 2 Ubisoft E3 Video Games PlayStation 4 Xbox One
Ben Travis
An inside look at the game world, story and role-playing in Ubisoft’s long-awaited sequel
/img/shortcut-icons/favicon.ico
Evening Standard
News | Tech

Beyond Good and Evil 2 team reveal the secrets of E3 2017’s most surprising game

An inside look at the game world, story and role-playing in Ubisoft’s long-awaited sequel

Intergalactic pirates: the team behind this year's biggest E3 surprise talk up Beyond Good and Evil 2

Ubisoft

Ben Travis23 June 2017

If there’s one thing E3 was mostly lacking this year, it was surprises. Some games were announced early, others leaked online, and some companies simply didn’t bring anything brand new to the show.

But there was one game that snuck up on everybody at the LA games expo: Beyond Good and Evil 2.

The long-awaited sequel to the cult classic action-adventure title had been presumed dead by some. We’re now 14 years on from the original game, 10 years on from when the follow-up was first mooted. And then Ubisoft went and closed their 2017 E3 presentation with a cinematic trailer promising a return to Beyond’s unique universe.

Not only is the vision in the trailer light years ahead of the first game, but the game’s mere existence brought the house down. Cynical journalists and jaded fans alike were left dumbfounded: can you believe it’s finally real?

As exciting as the Beyond Good and Evil 2 trailer is, it doesn’t include any actual gameplay. But behind the scenes at E3, the Evening Standard spoke to director Michel Ancel, writer Gabrielle Shrager, producer Guillaume Brunier, and associate creative director Emile Morel, who revealed a huge amount of information, tantalising concept art and an incredible technical demo.

Here’s an extensive look at the game behind the trailer, from the very people who are making it right now.

The world of Beyond Good and Evil

Ubisoft

Gabrielle Shrager – writer: “We imagined that in about the 22nd Century that China and India would be the new superpowers. They're the ones that would trademark the new propulsion engine and especially use next-generation crisper technology – the gene-splicing technology that scientists use today in the labs to create human-pig chimeras, and mice with human ears. We figured that in order to colonise space, private enterprises would basically create hybrids in their labs that were custom-designed to do all the heavy work. We'd create our own form of new slave labour.

“Since this new solar system is the centre of interstellar trade in the 24th century, you've got all the same ingredients that you have in the first golden age of piracy. You've got trade, competing for resources, slave labour, and the first colonists who are struggling to survive. Of course, the whole idea of pirates is that they don't differentiate between any origins, colours, they were the first ones to free slaves and allow them to join their groups. That's a really important message - camaraderie, freedom, it's all about being a pirate in this new solar system.”

Gabrielle Shrager reveals Beyond Good and Evil 2 at E3

Ubisoft

Pirate-centric gameplay

Emile Morel – associate creative director: “You will be a pirate captain in this game, and you will have to form your crew. We want this to happen while you travel. For instance, let's say I go into a slave ship at one point and I free this guy Knox [the cockney monkey seen in the trailer], who was locked inside a cell, and he's so thankful that I freed him that he will ask to join my crew. I will compose my crew and it will reflect my adventures, where I went, who I met in the game.

"You will start by creating your own character. This is an RPG game, so you can really create your own personal identity in this game and then go and travel in this universe and meet a lot of other characters.

"The notion of travel is really at the core of the experience for the player. Technology allows us to travel on huge planets, travel from one planet to another, travel in space. We really want players to go on a journey in this game."

The micro and macro scale

BGAE2 is envisioned to take place on three scales that blend seamlessly together.

Guillaume Brunier – producer: "This image [the pig in the restaurant] was made a year ago. It's very important for us to start from this, because this represents one of the many scales we have in the game, the human / hybrid scale.

Ubisoft

"The second scale is the city scale, which we see in games such as Watch Dogs or Ghost Recon – cities and landscapes. This is Ganesha City, with the huge statue you see in the trailer.

Ubisoft

"The third scale of the game is the planetary scale. This you see a bit less often in games. Beyond Good and Evil is all about the journey for the players, from that place with the pig in the s***** restaurant, to that large city, and then to travel through space."

Ubisoft

"We presented BGAE2 a bit early compared to other games. We wanted to share this with the fans so that they know that we're not only saying that we're making the game, but we want our message to be very consistent – the thing actually exists. Ganesha City is the same as the one you see in the trailer."

Connections to the original game

Michel Ancel – director: "It's absolutely connected to the first game. It's a story across generations – we will meet the ancestors of the characters in the first game. It's not a reboot, it's a real prequel. That's a very important point for us, we want to be true to Beyond Good and Evil, even if everything looks different. It's fifteen years later now and the technology has evolved.

"It's key for us [that BGAE2 is accessible for newcomers]. It's a prequel, you will discover everything."

Emile: “Some of the characters are what we call legendary characters – like the one you saw in the trailer with the green eyes – who may be related to characters from the first Beyond Good and Evil game."

Ubisoft

Guillaume: "If you played the first game, you're going to see a lot of things that will remind you of that.

"This looks like what we wanted to make as the first game. The vision of BGAE at that time was not possible to make because of the technology at that time. This one hopefully will be true to the original vision."

BGAE goes RPG

Michel: "You can play as any kind of character, you can customise them. There is an RPG system so that you can evolve. Your crew is very important too, the crew can evolve. There is not a crew editor or anything – your adventure drives you to somewhere, maybe you save someone, that person can join your crew. It's really about creating your own history within the story of the game. It's not just a random playground, it's really tied all together with the main story."

Emile: "Your crew also helps your ship to evolve. You could start with this space tuk-tuk vehicle, and if you play long enough you can maybe end up with the Mothership, which is so big that you can actually store smaller ships inside it. It's good to have ships for different adventures, if you go to a city you can't take the Mothership, you need something smaller.

Ubisoft

"The cockpit of your ship also reflects where you went and how you travelled in the game, the player stores all sorts of objects collected along the adventure."

The current game build

During our talk, Ancel demonstrated a hugely impressive early build of Ganesha city – zooming out from character level to the full solar system without any transitions or loading, and showing how the entire universe and everything in it works to scale.

Here are the comments the team made while showing the tech demonstration, and while we can’t provide the video to match, it gives a sense of what they’re aiming for.

Flying a jetpack around Ganesha City

Ubisoft

Michel: “Our target is to be very close to the trailer. I have control of the big space ship, it's a bit like a jail pirate space ship. Because it's very big, people will see that I’m a pirate and call the police. But you can open it, and use your smaller ship to explore. You can customise and change the colours, add a shampoo advertisement or something funny, so that people think you are just a normal stupid sailor.

“It's seamless, there is no loading, no transitions. You can see through the window all the things happening in your ship, there's no limit between the interior and exterior.

“If that ship was not mine, I could infiltrate, or I could take pictures of it and the pictures are a way of communicating to the game. When I take a picture of a symbol, if I see an NPC [non-player character] I can show him the picture and say, 'oh those pirates, I know them!' Taking pictures was very important in the first Beyond Good and Evil."

Zooming out from the city to the solar system

Ubisoft

Michel: "You think that the Ganesha statue is very big, but it's not. It's just part of a big city, that is part of a continent, that is a small dot on a planet, which is just a small planet in a big universe, around a bigger planet, until there is this thing of scale."

Guillaume: "We've also standardised speed so the jetpack is Level 1, like 10kph, and if you go at Level 1 speed in a ship it's also 10kph.

"[The time taken to travel from planet to planet] depends on what the distance is, but when you are out of any atmosphere of a planet, there's no friction anymore so you don't have any speed limit."

Michel: "When the speed is about 20,000kph you can try to go to space. When you see the speed of light, it's the real speed of light. You can go very, very fast."

The simulated universe

Ubisoft

Guillaume: "When we started the project three years ago, the first thing that we made was a simulation of the universe. When it's night in our game it's not because we turned our fake light down - it's just because the planet you're standing on is behind another planet. We didn't code the day and night cycle, we coded the universe so in the end there is a day and night cycle. It's just logical."

Michel: "You see I'm changing the time here, it's moving the planet around the sun.

"The AI and the events on the planet, everything is alive. When a meteorite is falling, it's changing the ground, the planet is modified, and the slaves go and try to find rare resources. It's creating crazy situations of huge planetary events. There are connections between all the places."

The cultural relevance of Beyond Good and Evil

Ubisoft

Michel: "The first Beyond Good and Evil was released during the very sad event of September 11th, and we were in that period of control of the media, propaganda about the war and Iraq. It was very very dark. I don't see that we are in such a dark period, but questions about diversity, racism, all these things are here. We want to showcase the diversity of the cultures on Earth. We don't want extra-terrestrial stuff, we want it to connect with what we believe in, the real cultures that already exist on Earth."

The reaction at E3

Michel Ancel reveals Beyond Good and Evil 2 at E3 2017

Ubisoft

Gabrielle: "I was hitting Michel going, don't you dare cry, don't you dare cry! And he did. It was unbelievably emotional. We've been waiting for so long.

"Making the trailer was a huge, huge endeavour for us, it was the entire team altogether. We have such fantastic artists, it was like oh my god, I can't believe we can actually share this with people. Every time I watch the trailer - it doesn't matter how many times - whenever I see the eyes and the music, I get chills. It was a great moment for us."

Follow Ben Travis on Twitter: @BenSTravis

Read More

Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service is like Netflix for video game

Play Mario Kart on Nintendo Switch on a date, in the pub and at a desk

The new Nokia 3310 is pure nostalgia- should you swap your iPhone?

Create a FREE account to continue reading

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

* FIRST NAME

* LAST NAME

* EMAIL

Your email address

* PASSWORD

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

* YEAR OF BIRTH

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT