Beyond Good and Evil 2 Is Reportedly Getting a New Name, Which Is One Way to Fix It

Beyond Good and Evil 2 was announced in 2008. To put that in perspective, a child born the week of that announcement can now legally drive in most of Australia. The game has still not shipped, and the latest claim is that Ubisoft's answer is to stop calling it Beyond Good and Evil 2.

What the rumour says, and how much to trust it

The claim comes from leaker Nash Weedle, relayed by the YouTube channel Attack the Backlog and reported by Destructoid. The short version: a brand new title, a possible showing at The Game Awards, and a possible Switch 2 port on a scalable engine.

The game has a brand new title, and Nash has been told that there have been many, many changes made to this game since we saw it a thousand years ago.

None of that is confirmed by Ubisoft. It is a leaker, quoted by a YouTuber, aggregated by an outlet, and now written up by us, which is roughly four handoffs away from anybody who has actually seen the game. File it accordingly.

Jade fighting a large green alien creature in a dim industrial interior in Beyond Good and Evil — The 2003 original, still the only Beyond Good and Evil anyone has finished. Screenshot via the 20th Anniversary Edition on Steam.

A brief history of waiting

The timeline is genuinely funny if you do not think about the people who worked on it. Announced 2008. Silence. Re-announced at E3 2017 with a cinematic trailer, a prequel setting and promises about owning your own spaceship. Silence again, broken mostly by staff departures and reporting on the studio's working conditions.

Somewhere in there, Michel Ancel left the industry. The 2017 pitch, a seamless galaxy with player crews and procedural planets, was the kind of ambition that sounds thrilling in a press conference and reads like a warning sign in a production schedule.

Jade walking through a street in Hillys past a banner reading Sector Alpha in Beyond Good and Evil — Hillys, 2003. Twenty three years later the sequel is still a rumour. Screenshot via the 20th Anniversary Edition on Steam.

Our take

A rename would be the most honest thing Ubisoft has done with this project in a decade. The name Beyond Good and Evil 2 now carries eighteen years of expectation that no game can satisfy, most of it attached to a 2003 cult classic that sold poorly and a sequel pitch that has been rewritten more than once. Cutting the number loose lets whatever they actually built be judged as itself.

It also, conveniently, lets the marketing stop reminding people how long they have waited. Both of those things are true at once, and only one of them is in the press release. If it turns up at The Game Awards under a different name, the first question worth asking is not what it is called. It is who is still there from 2017.