Does Anybody Care About Beyond Good and Evil 2?

I loved Beyond Good and Evil and I’m glad the original is getting a decent modern re-release. It comes with a new mission tied to the long-promised sequel, and I’m wondering at this point what that could possibly mean.

The original game was not a commercial success. Quite famously so. It sold less than 300,000 copies in the US, and it took price cuts of up to 80 percent to get there. Quick searching shows official mention of a sequel as early as 2007. For context, it is now 2024.

The point of this article isn’t to argue that nobody wants this game to happen. I do. I played the original on PS2, and then again when the 360 remaster came out. There are a wide range of people who’ve played Jade’s adventure since it originally released and would love to see more of her world. That number will go up because of the remaster too.

But how much do any of us care? Enough to buy it day one, regardless of what it actually is? Because in the days of AAA video games, a straight sequel isn’t going to cut it. Every mention of Beyond Good and Evil 2 in the last decade has been ambitious. And this is a project that has been started and stopped multiple times over nearly twenty years.

I’m not so sure there are enough people in the world who’ve even heard of Beyond Good and Evil to ever make up for that backstory. The brand just isn’t powerful enough to warrant a budget needed to get a game out the door. And yet it’s going to take a minimum of that for profitability to even be part of the conversation. That’s the reality of modern gaming.

So what’s the alternative?

Beyond Beyond Good and Evil

The scary thought here, and it’s kind of backed up by some of what we’ve seen so far, is that to make this game a success, it needs to be treated like a new IP. How many AAA new IPs have we seen lately?

Publishers are playing it safe with big blockbuster franchises, like Star Wars and Marvel. Creative people everywhere are expected to pitch ideas that are so safe sizeable fanbases are sold on them on the name alone. Beyond Good and Evil is not that.

And so Beyond Good and Evil must become something else. What does that entail? I don’t know. Nobody really knows. The last we heard of this game it was going to be “seamless co-operative giant open world”, which almost seems like something out of that Family Guy episode of South Park. There was going to be a level of destructable environments too. As I said above, ambitious.

If you had all of that on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, plus some gorgeous graphics, there would probably be enough to impress a wide amount of people. But that information is from before the pandemic. Who knows what the game is looking like now?

What we do know is that it’s a tough market, and (giving them the benefit of the doubt) Ubisoft are terrific for putting this much time, money and effort into it. My concerns are that not enough people want it, and that the market needs something far beyond the scope of what I consider Beyond Good and Evil to be for it to be a success. But I’ve never written something I’d be happier to be wrong about.