Beyond Good & Evil 2 was delayed due to artistic clashes between its managers, according to the series’ creator

Beyond Good & Evil 2 remains one of the most infamous unreleased video games in recent years. This is because Ubisoft announced it more than 15 years ago, later re-announced it a few years ago, and yet the game still hasn’t come out without any real explanation for its constant delays and disappearances.

But now we have at least one explanation, because Michel Ancel, the game’s former director and the creator of the Beyond Good & Evil franchise, recently did an interview with the French website Superpouvoir (that VGC partially translated into English) in which he discussed different aspects of his extensive career at Ubisoft, including many of the issues behind the development of Beyond Good & Evil 2.

The messy and controversial development of Beyond Good & Evil 2

Image via Ubisoft

According to Ancel, he felt like there were too many clashes between different managers at Ubisoft that kept further extending and delaying the development of the game. “Passion is a fabulous energy, but it can also lead to clashes between enthusiasts. On Beyond Good & Evil 2, for example, there were too many problems between managers”, said Ancel on the matter.

Different developers in leadership positions kept changing elements of the project, like the art director wanting to redo everything over and over again, or the game director wanting to make a game with generated dungeons while he actually wanted to make the space adventure he always dreamed of. Ancel states that all these different developers and managers simply couldn’t agree on anything.

“In this type of situation, the teams are thrown around and don’t even know who’s in charge and who’s making the decisions. The producer is supposed to bring order to the situation, but that didn’t happen” said Ancel. And it’s evident that the development of Beyond Good & Evil 2 got extremely messy, because at some point even the CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, had to go down to the studio in order to try and get it back on track.

Michel Ancel’s involvement with this infamous video game

Image via Ubisoft

“In the end, all this is a matter of passionate managers who did not get along (…) These management problems are of course very damaging for the teams. All this goes to show that it’s not an easy job (lots of egos and lots at stake) with clearly room for improvement in terms of human management” concluded Michel Ancel. All of this is especially interesting because he kept alluding to a “game director” who wanted to change things, while he himself was the director of Beyond Good & Evil 2 at that time. That’s right, it seems that Ancel is implying that he was part of the problem.

But he also went out of his way to point out that he did not question any of the other manager’s decisions, and that he felt frustrated when the French newspaper Libé accused him of hindering the game’s development by cultivating an abusive and toxic environment. This happened back in 2020, right around the time he left Ubisoft in order to work on wildlife sanctuary. Ancel responded to these claims and defended himself on his personal Instagram account.

So, who is really responsible for all of these issues?

Image via Ubisoft

However, in this new interview, Michel Ancel also admitted that he shares part of the responsibility and claimed that he should have been more vocal about defending the project. “There wasn’t just one big villain, but a whole series of key issues that remained unresolved at management level, including myself”, he revealed. This makes sense because AAA video games like this one take a lot of time and money to make, so it’s not always easy to pinpoint just one person who’s entirely responsible for its delays.

The truth is that we can’t really know what exactly happened at Ubisoft right around the time, but Ancel’s interview gave us some insight into the multiple clashes between managers and creatives within Ubisoft (himself included) that are affecting the development of Beyond Good & Evil 2. To make things even worse, its creative director, Emile Morel, suddenly passed away in 2023 and Ubisoft assigned Fawzi Mesmar to that same role very recently, in October of this year. Beyond Good & Evil 2 is clearly going through a very messy and complicated development, and many fans believe that it’s never coming out and/or that Ubisoft should cancel it.

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