Beyond Good & Evil 2 E3 In-Engine Footage Released

Ubisoft have released some in-engine footage from Beyond Good & Evil 2. It’s the first proper video from the game, one that isn’t made entirely of CGI, and it’s a cold shower – it shows how early in development the game still is. Michel Ancel, the game’s director, walks us through the footage, telling us about the team’s hopes and dreams for the project.

Spoiler: it’s really, really early stuff. Even Ancel calls it a mix of tech demo and gameplay. We’re probably not going to see this one within the decade. But hey, at least they’re talking about it officially, which is better than what we had for the past decade.

The video starts off with Ancel showing the ship from the CGI trailer. The mothership, as he calls it, will act as a home to your character, housing your crew and some more agile spaceships. It will allow you to store both the vehicles and people you’re not using at the moment. The switching from flying a craft to controlling only yourself seems to be seamless.

Ancel was playing as the sweary, Brittish monkeyman from the reveal, but the game will let you create your own character. Ship interiors will be playable levels, places you can explore and steal from. You’ll have a jetpack to help you move around, but more importantly, you’ll have a camera.

The camera will let you take pictures of stuff, which can then be shown to other characters to spark discussion and perhaps even some quests. He mentioned sharing information “between players”, which made me shudder at the thought of other people. Hopefully, the online interactions will be optional.

At one point, the developer starts zooming out the camera, to help us get a feel for the scale of the game. It’s big. It’s frighteningly big. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the video, and if you have any interest in BG&E2, you should give it a look.