Ubisoft delighted everyone last year, at E3 2017, when they premiered a cinematic trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2. Since then, the developer, Ubisoft Montpellier, has been sporadically showing us updates of what has become an extremely ambitious video game.
The first update had Creative Director Michel Ancel giving us a tour of the massive world they had built, but outside of the amazing flying mechanics, we didn’t get to see much gameplay. Thankfully, the developers remedied that by hosting a livestream that included about :45 seconds of new gameplay footage for Beyond Good & Evil 2, which you can see just below. Be warned, though, while the footage is stunning, it’s still very much pre-alpha footage.
The footage follows the character Shani, the getaway driver from the E3 2017 trailer. From what the footage shows us, she’s got a very particular set of skills that include combat, as well as driving. In fact, combat is something that the developers emphasized in the package. The combat for Beyond Good & Evil 2 will feature epic fights between massive aircrafts, that you pilot, and close-combat sword play, as an homage to the first game. Paying homage and honoring the first game that came before has actually been part of the development process for this game, and taking a page from the combat of the first game is just another way they’re able to do just that. Speaking of the combat, it appears that weaponry will be destroyed in this game, though it’s up in the air as to whether or not your weapons can be destroyed.
What isn’t up in the air are the details the developers shared in regards to the characters in Beyond Good & Evil 2. Unlike the first game where you followed Jade, Ubisoft Montpellier is allowing players to create their own character to assume the duties of pirate captain. You’d still have a crew with specialized abilities that you’d have to order around, though it’s unclear if these will be NPCs or controllable characters. Furthermore, the developers announced that there will be no load screens as you go to each planet in the Solar System (called System 3), which is something they talked about during the first update, but they really wanted to emphasize.
It may seem like too small a morsel to get excited about, but Ubisoft wants you to rest easy and look to E3 2018, where they plan to have a lot more to show! Until then, feel free to join the Space Monkey Program to keep up to date on all the latest news regarding Beyond Good & Evil 2. OR you can just make us your home page and find it all there too!
