Rumor: New BG&E 2 details, teaser trailer coming with NX reveal, summer 2018
Report: New Beyond Good & Evil To Be a 2018 Semi-Reboot, Not Full Sequel
In the wake of the news that a new Beyond Good & Evil game is in pre-development at Ubisoft with Michel Ancel heading up the project, Let’s Play Video Games has learned of a few details regarding the planned direction of the much-anticipated new entry in the franchise.
As many have noted since Ancel’s Instagram reveal for the game, neither Ubisoft or Ancel are referring to the game as Beyond Good & Evil 2. Lets Play Video Games has been informed by a source familiar with negotiations on the project that the game is planned to be more of a standalone reboot than a traditional sequel.
According to our source, the currently planned direction for the game is that it will partially retell Jade’s origin tale from Beyond Good & Evil, flesh out Peyj’s backstory, then continue to extrapolate on the ending of the original game. The intention is that players who have not played the original will be able to jump into the new game, which will feature a subtitle rather than a number at the end of its title, and understand both who Jade is and what drives Pey’j. It also seeks to provide closure to fans of the original wondering what the cliffhanger at the end meant for the series’ ongoing plot.
While many existing fans of the series may be upset about the new game not being a direct sequel, the idea of modernising the original tale and fleshing out the world while continuing the story beyond where it once ended offers the series a better chance of an ongoing life than it previously had.
Additionally, we have learned from a separate source that there are plans for a new CG trailer for the game to be shown alongside the NX reveal. Much like the 2008 trailer, this is planned to be a tone piece rather than a plot or gameplay reveal, and will be used to announce its NX exclusivity. The game is currently aiming for a Summer 2018 release window, according to sources at Ubisoft.
Ubisoft officially re-revealed Beyond Good and Evil 2 at its E3 2017 press conference. Platforms were not announced.
Beyond Good and Evil is a prequel to the original game featuring new characters. Ubisoft has also launched a “Space Monkey Program” inviting community members to participate in the development of the title.
Here’s an overview of the game, via Ubisoft:
The world – or rather worlds – of Beyond Good & Evil are back on the horizon with the unveiling of Beyond Good and Evil 2, a prequel and spiritual successor to the beloved 2003 classic. Helmed once again by developer Michel Ancel, Beyond Good and Evil 2 invites players to explore System 3, a vast solar system and a hub of interstellar colonization and commerce in the 24th century – and fans have a chance to help shape it by taking a role in the development process.
System 3, as it turns out, is a place where limited resources are viciously warred over by various private enterprises. The struggle for survival amid a rich milieu of evolved species and diverse cultures from Old Earth creates an ideal environment for space piracy, as a new generation of captains rise up to carve out a piece of the galaxy for themselves.
As you rise from lowly pirate to legendary captain, you’ll traverse System 3 at light speed to explore freely on your own or with friends. Presenting its solar system as a massive, seamless online environment, Beyond Good and Evil 2 gives players the chance to dive into the foundations of the franchise’s universe while traveling between diverse planets and moons in search of adventure.
“We know the expectations for Beyond Good and Evil 2 are enormous,” says Creative Director Michel Ancel. “We’re creating a sci-fi space opera, a game where players fight for freedom alongside unforgettable characters and explore a stunning and vast solar system, all while capturing the spirit of Beyond Good and Evil.”
Ancel wants your help to do it, too. The Beyond Good and Evil 2 team at Ubisoft Montpellier is looking for fans to help by sharing ideas and feedback, and encourage players to sign up now for the Space Monkey Program.
Ubisoft details Beyond Good and Evil 2 behind closed doors E3 2017 demo
Ubisoft officially re-revealed Beyond Good and Evil 2 during its E3 2017 press conference earlier this week with a CG trailer, but behind closed doors on the expo show floor, creative director Michel Ancel, narrative director Gabrielle Shrager, and producer Guillaume BRunier showcased an in-engine demo to members of the press.
The Ubiblog has gone up with a full recap of the behind closed doors demo, replicated below:
Our first glimpse of the game is of the massive statue of the elephant-headed god Ganesh seen in the teaser trailer. It’s so big that it dwarfs that also-gigantic pirate spaceship seen at the trailer’s end, which floats in front of it as the trailer’s city stretches out to the horizon far below.
“This is really huge,” Ancel says, as he pulls in close to the pirate ship using his controller. This, he says, is fully controllable, and will be your home in Beyond Good and Evil 2. It’s also your crew’s home, as well as a garage for smaller, customizable spaceships that you can also control.
The ship’s prow opens, and one of those smaller ships floats out. “Here, it’s a generic ship, with basic controls,” says Ancel. “And I just want to show you the scale…”
Ancel pulls the camera out until the city blends into its surrounding landmass and the curvature of the planet becomes visible. Suddenly, we’re in space, and the planet that seemed so gigantic now looks tiny against the massive ringed giant it orbits.
“You can see that that city is just a little part of a huge world,” says Ancel. “You see that we are just on top of a gigantic planet, which is in fact a little satellite of a bigger planet, with cities and the dark. And there is a simulation of the universe, where everything is rotating in the classical way, so if you change the time you see the rotation.”
As Ancel speaks, he speeds up time in the demo, and the nearby planets and stars begin moving relative to the little planetoid we had occupied – including the sunlight, as days pass rapidly. He then zooms back to the statue, so we can see the effect from the ground.
“When you see the sunset, it’s not just colors, it’s the real sun going into this position,” says Ancel. “If you know what a sunset is, a sunset is modification of the color of the sun depending on the angle in the atmosphere. So it’s really logical, in fact, that you can see different colors.”
He then gets out of the little ship as Knox, the monkey-human hybrid who starred in the trailer. (You won’t necessarily play as Knox; Ancel says the player’s hero will be a created character, and can be male or female depending on your preference.) Using Knox’s jetpack, he flies up close to the statue, hovering inches away so that we can see the detail hammered into the bronze.
“Just to show you the kind of issues we are facing with the sizes, we need to have something like that,” he says, indicating the statue. “Precise from space to one millimeter of distance, to see all the details. That’s the kind of challenge we need to face for the game. It’s not a small part of the world. Every centimeter needs to be very precise.”
This is the scale Ancel and his team had hoped to work in when creating the original Beyond Good and Evil, he says, but it wasn’t possible given the technology at the time. Even with today’s technology, creating a game world the size of a star system is still a potentially daunting task, one that Ancel says is being undertaken with a mix of hand-crafted design and procedural generation.
“Cities can grow by themselves, they can be destroyed, they can connect to others,” he says. “Everything is alive, in fact, it’s not pre-scripted. So it’s a balance. We can say, ‘this part of the planet has those kinds of resources,’ and depending on those things, kind of emergent things… today, we can hand-craft everything, or we can decide to have a kind of robot that is going to calculate the history of the planet.
“Even us, we don’t know exactly what’s on this planet. We know there are things, but we don’t know exactly where they are, we don’t know exactly what it is,” he adds.
While the game will be procedurally generated to some extent, however, its story will be anything but.
“I would say the adventure system is classic,” Ancel says. “We don’t really want to create something crazy with an adventure generator… it’s simple, but you have a lot of freedom in the way of solving things. So it’s interesting to imagine a game where you can decide to do this or that, and the order is not that much important, and the way you manage the problems is your way of playing.
“We want people to create their play style, their crew, they customize their ship, but they are in the same universe, the same adventure,” Ancel adds. “So you can say, ‘How did you get into the prison?’ Oh, I did that and that.’ ‘Oh no, I did another thing!’ But at the end, everybody went into the prison and got the guy and added him to the crew. You will have different possible decisions, of course, but there is a structure. You can compare to each other what you’ve done.”
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a prequel set in a vast star system, System 3, that sees players begin with very little and work their way up to becoming a legendary space pirate – and as soon as they have the means, they can go wherever they want.
“That is, for us, the feeling of traveling, of adventure,” says Ancel when asked about Beyond Good and Evil’s scale. “No boundaries. You want to go somewhere, you want to discover the world. That’s the new trend in action-adventure games: you see mountains in the distance, there is something, a city, something that is attracting you, you can go there. Maybe it’s very dangerous, but you can try to go there.
“We tried to make Beyond Good and Evil with what we had at that time, and it’s cool, because it created something very unique,” he says. “We want to retrieve the same feelings and the same emotion of entering a big factory, investigating about slavery or human trafficking… the same big theme, in a different world.”
Beyond Good and Evil 2 will star your custom character, but the rest of the cast will be fully realized and, Ancel suggests, evocative of the first game’s characters and themes.
“They are here, or their ancestors are here,” says Ancel. “You don’t play them, but they are in the world, and they are key to making this world unique… the DNA will be there. Plus it’s not a reboot, it’s a prequel, so you will discover a lot of information about those characters.”
Beyond Good and Evil 2 takes place “about a generation before Jade was born,” says Gabrielle Shrager, the game’s narrative director. Long before human-animal hybrids like Pey’j were free, she says, they began as custom-made slaves designed to withstand the harsh conditions of interstellar colonization.
In the 22nd century, some 200 years before the events of Beyond Good and Evil 2, “we imagined that China and India became the superpowers,” says Shrager. “In order to colonize the stars, they created hybrids as a slave labor force… and so with that slave-labor force, they were able to colonize the stars.”
The demo city and its Ganesh statue were created by the first Indian colonists, she says, “while other cities will have influences that are Chinese, Mongolian, and as many Earth cultures as we can represent. They will explore into the stars and they will invent their own religions to give new meaning to their existence in this really harsh area.”
The newly colonized System 3 has become a hub of interstellar trade – and as corporations exploit their hybrid laborers, the conditions are created for a new era of space piracy.
“And that’s where the player comes in,” says Shrager.
As Beyond Good and Evil 2 opens, says Ancel, you’ll start at the low level of its social system with small vehicles, and gradually discover new vehicles and friends that begin to expand your world. As he’s describing this, he points to a smattering of character concept art pinned to the wall.
“You can imagine that all these guys are people you met during the adventure, and then they join your crew and they help you manage this huge spaceship,” he says. “So you need a crew, which means that you need exploration to create a crew, to have a bigger ship, more exploration, more investigations… there’s a lot to discover, lots of challenges and sub-quests.”
The developers still have a lot of work ahead of them in creating Beyond Good and Evil 2’s massive adventure, and they want your help. By joining the Space Monkey Program, you’ll be able to assist the team by testing and experiencing different parts of the game.
“It can be the controls, it can be the decisions, the online system, the trading system, all these things,” says Ancel. “It’s a way to experience people getting their feedback on the gameplay side, but also showing concept art, asking people for their own ideas or experience, traveling, whatever. I think they learn when they travel, because that’s been the theme of the game: you travel, you discover cultures. And you take that, and you are richer because of this travel.”
Ubisoft has released a walkthrough of the in-engine demo Beyond Good and Evil 2 shown behind closed doors shown at E3 2017 last week.
The video features creative director Michel Ancel playing and commenting on the in-engine demo. Ubisoft notes that it is a work in progress and “not super polished,” and asks that you share your feedback on the official website or forums.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 ‘Ship and Crew Update’ developer diary
Ubisoft has released a new developer diary for Beyond Good and Evil 2 providing an update on the game’s ships and crews.
During an hour-long live stream today, the development team at Ubisoft Montpellier shared more information about the game. Here are the notable tidbits, via Eurogamer:
The game can be played single-player, but the team wanted users to be able to play with friends. Senior producer Guillaume Brunier said, “A part of the story will be the story you tell as you meet and play with friends,” and added that there will also be traditional narrative-lead stories “with a beginning, middle and end, with strong characters, which will emotional.”
Your crew will help progress the story, rather than chat with an AI helper. “Here we want [to feature] the crew members, the officers, you will meet on your journey,” said creative director Michel Ancel. “Like Pey’J and Double H. We don’t want to force an AI – we want players to meet characters. A bit more digital and a bit less physical”
In one storyline, you meet a chimp named Knox whose planet you visit and meet his family. Because of the game engine’s ability to create animal hybrid characters that look like others, Knox’s family will look similar to him.
The game engine allows for seamless transition from a small teahouse somewhere in a big city to a giant spaceship in space.
The development team has almost tripled in size since E3. Right now the focus is building “a real, vibrant city for people to explore,” according to Brunier, referring to the city shown in the E3 2017 trailer.
Regarding whether Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a prequel, Ancel said, “The first idea for Beyond Good & Evil was to make three games, a trilogy. But when we started thinking about the next game we thought the [series’] world was so big, so dense it would be a shame to not talk about its origins. Who is Jade? She’s very mysterious. She has a dark side. We want to go deeper into these things.” He continued, “And will continue going through the episodes, the stories of this world,” he added. “But we wanted to start with a prequel.”
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发表于 2016-9-30 07:34 AM
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