Michel Ancel is at E3 2017 promoting the newly unveiled Beyond Good & Evil 2, but people have been asking about his other game, WiLD. Responding to some questions on Instagram, Ancel said, “We’re working hard on WiLD too!!! Expect strong updates during the coming year.”
As for Beyond Good & Evil 2, Ancel told GameSpot that part of the reason it’s taken so long is because of the game engine, which allows for seamless transitions between the ground, sky, and space:
This was the first dream that motivated us to delay the game. It was impossible to do this with the previous tech, and maybe we were not able to do it. But now we feel we can do it.
With the Ubi Blog noting that the behind closed doors presentation featured “an in-engine controlled demo to illustrate the massive scale on which Beyond Good & Evil 2 operates,” Ancel revealed to The Verge that they are at “day zero of development.” Currently, according to GameSpot, the tech is in place, but all they have is a vast but barren world and the large floating spaceship at the end of the trailer that is your home.
Asked why they’d show off this game so early in the development process, when things like graphics and combat and narrative aren’t implemented yet, Ancel replied:
We could have presented this game with a completely playable demonstration, but we had this idea to show it now because we want to let people see how we are going to build the game. The steps before this are not very interesting, [they’re] very technical, but now we can explain how we are building the world. We want to build prototypes and let people download and play them so they can test them.
And you can play online, so for example we expect to make prototypes of different modules in the game, let people play, give feedback, and they can even build their own ship since we have this very flexible customization system. You can even create your faction or gang with colours and these things and share them. We want people to participate, and our dream would be to come back in one year with all this absolutely playable and polished in a demonstration. We’d love to have people have that feeling that they’re helping and participating in making this possible.
If you’re worried that Beyond Good & Evil 2 is too ambitious and won’t ever see the light of day, Ancel said, “[…] we can say for sure that we will make this game, we’ll finish it. Because we have the technology for it.” However, Ancel said 2018 is too early to expect it to release.
Also in the interviews, Ancel talked about how you can play by yourself or play with friends in online co-op, that you create your own in-game avatar and start at the very bottom of the social system, and the worlds will be a mix of hand-designed and procedurally-generated.
[Source: Michel Ancel (Instagram), GameSpot, The Verge, Ubi Blog via WCCFTech]
