Michel Ancel Sure Is Saying Some Stuff About Beyond Good & Evil 2

Okay, OK. This is one of those times where there’s kinda no real “news,” and yet it’s still worth mentioning because, well, Beyond Good & Evil 2.

The sequel to the beloved 2003 action-adventure game has been one of this generation’s great pieces of vapourware. The series has been missing in action for a decade, skipping this generation of gaming consoles completely. Since the initial teaser trailer we’ve seen only concept environmental screenshots and demo videos. BG&E 2 clearly exists, but it’s hard to say much beyond that.

That said, it’s been nice how willing BG&E creator Michel Ancel has been to talk about the game, even if he doesn’t really give definitive answers about its current status. He’s talked in the past about his ambitions for BG&E2, and how he’s probably waiting for the next generation of consoles.

Ancel talked a bit more about that last week — while demonstrating this year’s Rayman Legends, he talked to Eurogamer and IGN about the state of Beyond Good & Evil 2.

Ancel says that the sequel, as they imagined it, became too big even for current-generation consoles. Though it’s not entirely clear what he means by that, given that the first game was made for the previous generation of consoles.

From Eurogamer:

Ancel’s vision for the sequel is big – much bigger than the first Beyond Good & Evil, which had a lot of its scope cut back from his initial plans.

“In Beyond Good & Evil 1 at first it was a full planet, you could go to the North Pole and see the eternal day,” he explained. “But we had to limit it as we were only 35 people. We couldn’t fill the whole world with all the things we wanted. We were frustrated at the end of BG&E1, and when we started the sequel we started again with this idea – you’re free and can investigate and travel the world as much as you want.”

While the first game saw players explore just a small section of the planet Hillys (and a quick end-of-game excursion to its moon), its sequel is planned to feature a far more open world, and worlds. “We wanted to not make this experience [BG&E2] linear, to give the player freedom to explore planet to planet, city to city – and not empty cities, of course. So these are things we worked on.”

The scale he’s talking about is well beyond… well, frankly, it’s beyond what I’d even want or need from a BG&E sequel, but if he wants to make the game span multiple planets, that’s cool with me. You know, as long as he makes the thing.

IGN also sat down with Ancel and asked him about — what else? — Beyond Good & Evil 2. Here’s some of what he told them:

“More than ‘bigger,’ it’s the freedom we want to give to the player,” Ancel explained. “In this kind of game, while you’re investigating, you don’t want to investigate in a story that has been written by the developers. My feeling is that you want to investigate with your own way of investigating. I like the freedom of choosing your vehicles, flying away with the spaceship and all those things. It was in Beyond Good & Evil 1 but it was not as much as we wanted. I like the fact that if you want to fly from one city to another, one planet to another, it’s something that you should be able to do. That freedom and the world of Beyond Good & Evil is very challenging to do.”

Ancel said to Eurogamer that one way or another, he and his team are “on it,” and said, “We’ve made a lot of things already. Now we need to put them together and make that game.”

Well then. Not a lot of specifics to be found. But the man is still talking about Beyond Good & Evil 2 in a way that suggests that somewhere, in some pot on some stovetop, he’s got a stew going.

And so the world keeps on turning, bringing us one revolution closer to the day when we finally learn something solid about Beyond Good & Evil 2. Maybe on that day, we’ll finally get to stop using the same damned high-res Pey’j image we’ve been using for the last five thousand years. Cool!

Read more over at Eurogamer and IGN.