Beyond Good & Evil 2 boss explains the delays: it needs "planet exploration, space travel, cities"

Those old snippets of gameplay we saw for Beyond Good & Evil 2 were legit, Michel Ancel says, but there were just too many technical issues to keep pursuing them at the time. Ancel, one of the main creative forces behind the series, shared some new insight on his Instagram account about why the sequel has taken so long to arrive and why the team at Ubisoft Montpellier has recently restarted its efforts.

2008 Characters . The game was playable with many prototypes . All videos where realtime but we had too much technical issues . We wanted planet exploration , space travel , cities ... All this was also supposed to be in BGE 1 ... Instead of not doing the game of our dreams , we decided to return to 2d , have fun with Rayman and go back at work for Beyond good and Evil 2 . We still have loooooots of work but now the tech is ready and the team is fantastic !
A photo posted by @michelancel on Oct 19, 2016 at 12:18am PDT

Before you get excited, the faces in the picture aren't from the current version of the game - they're old prototypes from around when the game was first announced in 2008. But they could give you an idea of how Jade and her old pals Pey'j and Double-H (I think that's him in the middle, anyway) will look in the future.

Ancel and co. wanted 'planet exploration, space travel, and cities' in the sequel but they just couldn't pull it all off. The team actually wanted all of that for the original Beyond Good & Evil as well - it had vehicle-based planet exploration but only a bit of space travel and a single city - so rather than make more compromises they decided to let the project lie for a while and work on those excellent 2D Rayman games instead. Fair enough.

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Apparently the technology has finally come around and the team are all ready to go now, seeing as Beyond Good & Evil 2 is (back) in pre-production. Expect a much grander journey for Jade's next adventure, whenever it arrives. Until then, you can always play the first one again.

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