orthodoxy1095
Banned
“That was not a gimmick but a way to say 'Look. The game exists and we can do it.'”, Ancel says, explaining the timing behind the image’s release. Ancel says his team at Ubisoft has been working on the sequel properly since the release of Rayman Legends - it’s still a long way from release, and needs to be “more concrete” before he spills all the beans, but represents “a very serious development for Ubisoft.”
Ancel explains that one of the reasons it’s taken this long for the game to go into full development is that the technology simply wasn’t mainstream until two years ago.
For Beyond Good and Evil 2, Ancel and his team wanted a focus on interplanetary travel. “Even on Beyond Good and Evil 1 it was supposed to have space travel and all these things but we were limited,” Ancel says. “The big thing that is really cool is that the consoles are now so powerful [...] The amount of memory the CPU has, you can do those things now. It's not 'Oh, we will never do it.' It's working.”
Ancel admits that, even if he wanted to make this game a decade ago, other developers are now tackling the same challenges of galactic-scale games. “It's like the gold rush on planets,” Ancel says. “We're looking at games like Star Citizen and seeing they have these big planet systems and thinking 'We have the same problems but we are more advanced on this side, [whereas] they're doing something nice on this side.'”
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/11/24/michel-ancel-on-beyond-good-evil-2-and-the-future-of-ubisoftPerhaps this inspired a certain mindset with BG&E2. The opportunities for releasing it would have meant compromises and so - despite the evidence of pre-production work surfacing sporadically over the years - the project was never moved into full production. But neither was it cancelled, which Ancel says is thanks to Yves Guillemot and Serge Hascoet, respectively Ubisoft’s CEO and chief creative officer.
“They want these kinds of games to exist,” Ancel says. “When they wake up in the morning they don't want to make money - they've got money for ten lives if they want to stop. It's not a question of power or money now. What reason has this company to live: Is it to beat competitors? No, [Ubisoft’s] already in the top three. It's being able to create things that have never been created before. [Guillemot and Hascoet] are the ones that want to make this happen. They ask the creatives 'You want to do it? We can do it.'”