Beyond Good & Evil 2 Is STILL in Pre-Production — 18 Years Later, It’s Now a “Solo-First” Adventure

Eighteen years after Ubisoft first announced it, Beyond Good & Evil 2 still hasn’t entered full production. A new report from French outlet Origami — the same outlet that correctly leaked the disbanding of the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team — says the game remains in pre-production at Ubisoft Montpellier, with at least 250 people working on it at that studio alone, and the team only now aiming to push the project into alpha and through the internal “gate” that would finally start production.

The game those 250 people are making is not the one Ubisoft pitched a few years ago. According to the report, covered in English by Eurogamer and VGC, the 2019–2022 version of Beyond Good & Evil 2 was a highly multiplayer, connected game spread across a multitude of planets. The hook was a “third place” — a social hub where players would hang out with friends between adventures, with Fortnite and Destiny named as inspirations. Players would create their own character and ride along in the passenger seat with the heroes of the original game.

That vision kept shrinking. Matchmade groups gave way to more open-ended play, then team-based groups of four, then pairs. What’s left standing, per Origami, is a “solo-first” adventure: “The aim now is to offer a ‘solo-first’ adventure, with no mandatory online connection and featuring a strong narrative that can also be played in co-op.” The feel has shifted with it — where the game once drew comparisons to Zelda in space, its combat is now said to be very reminiscent of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. Under the hood, it is still running on Ubisoft’s Voyager engine.

So why has a game with hundreds of developers and nearly two decades behind it never reached production? Origami’s sources say the project has historically failed to meet all of its creative milestones — the playable “gates” Ubisoft uses to judge progress — because the idea of what the game should be kept changing. For years, cancellation was reportedly off the table entirely, which people inside the company described as something of a poison: a project that could never be cancelled might also never be finished.

That protection may finally be gone. Ubisoft’s ongoing restructure has already closed Trials developer RedLynx and downsized teams elsewhere, and BGE2 staff are reportedly now being told, far more bluntly, that nobody knows what is going to happen — a shift one source called a return to a sense of reality.

For longtime fans, none of this is new — it is just the latest chapter in the longest development saga games have ever seen. Beyond Good & Evil 2 passed Duke Nukem Forever’s record back in 2022. Ubisoft showed it behind closed doors at E3 2018 and promised a playable beta by the end of 2019 that never arrived. Creator Michel Ancel left in 2020, a new creative director has since taken over, and job ads for the project still surface from time to time.

Ubisoft hasn’t commented on the report, and everything above comes from anonymous sources speaking to Origami — so treat it as reported, not confirmed. But if it’s accurate, the most infamous vaporware in gaming is, somehow, still alive. It’s just still at the starting line.