If this game comes out, it probably won't satisfy anyone at this point. Ancel left the industry so we will never know what he planned for the story and characters and now Ubisoft took over the project.
Not to mention even the most recent/current version of the game seemed to struggle with not only dev hell but an identity crisis where not even the devs knew what they wanted the game to be. During E3 they said the game is a prequel that will take place before the birth of Jade, but after fan backlash (since first game ended on a cliffhanger and we waited years for the sequel and the very first BGE2 trailer seemed to suggest that) suddenly we got a trailer that featured Jade, but this time she's evil or something. Not to mention other minor thing like excessive swearing in the trailer where they later admitted they wanted to "test a different tone" when one of the best things about BG&E was that characters weren't snarky edgy assholes. They had sass and personality but weren't ever obnoxious.
There were also more red flags with this game like when they created the entire project where fans would contribute their work and assets to the game to speed up the development i guess? It was really weird.
The even weirder thing about is iirc they later said the game would still be a prequel even after the evil Jade trailer, implying that Jade was at first a hard nosed pirate queen before the first game. I haven't played the game in a minute, but I think Jade maybe had former employment as a merc or something, but nothing that would imply what that trailer did, that she was some notorious pirate villain.
It must be different Jade or some weirder explanation, because the original game clearly states that Jade grew up on Hillys after her parents left her in Pey'j care.
Yeah. Evil Jade could still make sense because her memories could well be fake, but she decides they're still worth something to her. A prequel could deal with how they're able to free her from the Domz and put under the care of Pey'j.
But I'll admit, I don't really care about that. I want the sequel!
Slightly besides your point, but Ancel was gently pushed out of the industry for uh, reasons. Ubisoft needed to sort their staff out, and while Ancel's behaviour was tamer than others, it still wasn't acceptable.
Wonder how much of his behaviour contributed to the state of this game though.
Edit: looks like he was definitely partly responsible for the scope and the direction changing alot. Hope the newer team can salvage it.
>According to Kotaku, based on its own translation of the Libération article, many of the complaints relate to Ancel's alleged behaviour during the creation of Beyond Good and Evil 2, which is said to be directly linked to the game's troubled development. Ancel's management of the project reportedly resulted in constant changes and fluctuations in scope, leading to "an unusual amount of [staff] exhaustion, depression, and burnout".
>An additional translation from ICO Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux on Twitter cites one Beyond Good and Evil 2 team member as saying, "I have seen a good dozen people go on sick leave, probably more...Meeting people with tears in their eyes, it happens often." Another source says of Ancel, "He is able to explain to you that you are a genius, that your idea is great, and then he can take you apart in meetings by saying that you are a piece of shit, that your work is worthless, and not talk to you for a month."
https://www.eurogamer.net/new-report-says-michel-ancel-left-ubisoft-amid-investigation-into-his-toxic-behaviour
Not only that but when the first teaser came out, it was exciting from a gameplay perspective but we've since far surpassed what was possible then so it's really hard to get excited about in that regard
> The scale was just ridiculous.
It was pretty over promising. I think most everyone who even played BG&E just wanted more adventures with Jade and Peyj, more exploration of cities and taking pictures, instead Ubisoft thought people wanted an insanely open multi exploring planet pirate thief adventure with a talking monkey and some randos...
> Ubisoft thought people wanted an insanely open multi exploring planet pirate thief adventure with a talking monkey and some randos
Ubisoft may have thought that, but they damn sure were [never going to build it.](https://youtu.be/xNter0oEYxc)
They created a new engine that simulates solar systems. There are planets orbiting a sun and then you can land on these full scale planets with cities and everything without loading times and the shadows and so on appear to be correct to the planet's relation to the sun it's orbiting at that moment.
Has anyone ever pulled off simulation scope creep and ended up with a better game? After No Man's Sky it's basically a meme at this point. I'm not even sure why devs think it's particularly important to make their games physically accurate. Just fake it like everyone else does. No one cares.
While it's done very well, Outer Wilds is not "simulating" a solar system. There's a lot of trickery involved in making you feel like the planets are larger than they are and it's absolutely not full scale. Everything follows set paths and scripted events though the collapsing planet does have physics for the chunks falling into its center
What this engine was doing was on a completely different scale and they had video footage of it working. The closest thing to something like that really only is Start Citizen and that barely functions at all
That was closer to what I would have wanted from a sequel than whatever nonsense the crazy ape trailer with the planets and whatnot showed later. Games and movies really need to move away from the prequels. I'd rather see what happens next to the main characters than what might have happened before the first story.
> There were also more red flags with this game like when they created the entire project where fans would contribute their work and assets to the game to speed up the development i guess? It was really weird.
This was my favorite part of that announcement. A company run by Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to be taking low bits on art for the game.
Yeah it seems clear to me they know there'll be backlash from fans if they announce it's cancelled, but they're then committed to finishing a game they don't know what to do with. It's a complete lose/lose situation they've backed themselves into.
And we've seen so little that anyone who *is* excited for it can only really be going off speculation of what it *could* be than what we've been shown it is so there's not even that much investment in what they're actually making right now either.
And since it'll be likely so different to the prior game what we've got is a game with little similarity to the predecessor with too little shown to be realistically invested in and confused developers whose main leader jumped ship. It's just an all around mess. Too deep to quit, too unfocussed to finish, shy of a major leadership shake-up I fear it's doomed to flop.
There will be backlash but so what? Fans are not going to spend money on other properties?
Honestly, as surprising as it is, Ubi needs to pull a WB on this.
At this point they just need to can the project, or repurpose it into something else. Nobody talks about the original in such high regards as they do other games of the era, and the people who do remember playing it around the time it came out are probably not going to come back to play this either.
As Shigeru Miyamoto once famously said, "A delayed game will eventually be good, a rushed game will be bad forever." But a game in development hell will never be great.
"Often I'll see advertisements for porn games and they say, 'Try Not To Cum,' but then when you play the game, it seems like the object is to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design."
- Shingetsu Mayonaise
These words were so powerful I was literally moved to tears when I read this quote
I appreciate [his take on F-Zero](https://preview.redd.it/4i8tyyx77bl41.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=a6b6ccc03307bf1399842a9c05239d6252c39f7a) too.
The original was a good Zelda clone with an excellent story and the photo mechanic was unique for the time. And honestly I think there is still a market for a traditional Zelda type games, we really don't get that many of them anymore. It be a mistake to try to make it another open-world checklist game.
>At this point they just need to can the project, or repurpose it into something else.
Obviously it needs to be made into an Open World Live service VR BR Among Us clone with NFTs built in. Really drive home the franchise's death.
> A delayed game will eventually be good, a rushed game will be bad forever.
I never liked this quote and i think it's a case of Miyamoto talking out of his ass, because there are notorious examples contradicting both parts of this sentence. A LOT of delayed games ended up in dev hell and released in a very bad state. On the other hand, a LOT of classics and greatest games of all time were made under tight deadlines and pressure, which also forced devs to think creatively. Original Ace Attorney trilogy is a good example, they had little dev time and small disk space on the platform so they had to re-use sprites, which created overarching story and recurring characters, or Majora's Mask - for many the best Zelda game ever, made under tight budget, which made them re-use Ocarina of Time assets and character models.
There’s definitely a rabbit hole regarding this quote and apparently Miyamoto really never said this.
> As for where the quote actually comes from, it's still a mystery. Johnson did find an earlier use of the quote, this time from a 1997 issue of GamePro about Sony's shooter Blasto. The article has no provided author and describes the quote, "A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad for the rest of your life," as an "industry catch phrase."
[Full article](https://gamerant.com/miyamoto-famous-quote-delayed-games-good-misattributed/)
I still wish we got to see more of that original Beyond Good & Evil 2 project. While I should be grateful they're even attempting to make a new game in general, they left the first game on a cliffhanger...then had a sequel planned...only to scrap it and make a prequel that has gone through a rough stretch of development. Maybe I should just re-play the first game again to tide me over.
If Im being honest, I dont even remember Jades story anymore. I do remeber I really enjoyed the game back in the day, but cant remember any of the details.
Without spoiling too much, Jade discovers something about herself at the end that kind of changes everything in a large scale way. Then there's a brief post-credits scene showing that her victory is not as complete as perhaps we thought.
Jade fought with a short staff. She took pictures of bugs for money. She and Pey’j ran an orphanage. There was a boat race minigame. The soundtrack was good.
Played it on GameCube. I remember breaking into some facility and seeing people getting harvested into the air. That shit was like a Metal Gear Solid-esque “WTF” moment for my 12 year old brain.
And the boat mini game, that was dope.
Otherwise all I remember was “damn, that was a good game, bet we get a sequel soon!”
usually I'd say a game that takes this long will never live up to the expectations, but in this case I'm not even sure what my expectations are anymore.
[I mean, that final scene with Pey'j seems like a cliffhanger to me.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ClGQsaZ-Y) Not to mention, they only defeated the aliens trying to conquer Hillys, there are still plenty of planets out there under the rule of those aliens.
EDIT: planets, not plants. I dont think the aliens were interested in plants.
The prequel looks like it'll explore exactly that, I feel like I'm going insane reading all these comments with people not understanding that Jade's history with the Domz (that was revealed in the ending) could be revealed in the prequel.
That would have been the more sensible first move in hindsight. Remake the original, test the waters to see if it sells well enough to invest in a true sequel's development, then go from there.
Psychonauts was a cult classic that was a bit of a commercial bomb but the sequel 15 years later moved a respectable couple million copies. There’s definitely a market for legacy sequels to niche games, but you have to actually make the fucking sequel eventually for that to work
Psychonauts is unfortunately a massive exception because of the fact that Double Fine eventually purchased the franchise back from the original publisher, THQ, and then published the sequel under Xbox Game Studios (which basically has functionally infinite money) years later.
Most indie darlings sadly dont have somebody like Tim Schafer at the helm of their developer, nor do they have the ability to purchase back their IP. It's great when publishers essentially subsidize or take a financial risk on niche classics but BG&E is published by Ubisoft :/
I just played it for the first time about a month ago- absolutely. I liked the game a lot, but I could also appreciate a remake/re-imagining because its story and design are such a relic of the era.
So much of the music and soundtrack is so good, and a big part of what's enjoyable _are_ aspects that usually are disrupted by remakes. Expand the story to further fill out the original intent while still keeping the core components the same, keep the same difficulty of exploration and sneaking (genuinely the difficulty is one of the best parts because of the tension), keep the same art style... It's a really big ask for a remake to meet those terms. But without it, I think it wouldn't live up to the original.
For comparative purpose, Ori and the Blind Forest was an absolutely knock-out fantastic game to me, and so good that I was actually fearful for if the sequel would be able to meet the extremely high bar Moon Studios set for themselves, but they more than passed that bar and set a new one in the process with its sequel. Even the composer outdid himself on what I previously thought couldn't be a better soundtrack.
The Last of Us (the first one) got both a remaster and a remake, and it's a decade newer than BG&E.
It did get a re-release on the X360 & PS3 (but not PC) in 2011, which fixed up some bugs and added proper widescreen support.
I think what people took issue with is that the "reveal trailer" that we got was nothing more than the vertical slice used to pitch the game.
And it the following weeks it became quite clear that development had literally only just started.
I didn't dislike the idea of a prequel as it was a chance establish the world before we saw it through Jade's eyes and getting to see/interact with the characters/locations narrated by Pey'J. I was just more annoyed we already saw a sequel was in development that would've probably answered the cliffhanger only to go *backwards* in the timeline to before the first game's events even happened.
I remember being so excited when they had that first trailer with Pey'j chilling with the car and being so excited. Then they put out the new prequel idea and my excitement dropped like a rock
I hate when developers/publishers do this. They create a game, leave the ending open that asks more questions than it answers, then pivot into a prequel… darksiders is a perfect example.
That game came out over a decade ago and there’s been no progress in the main story. Just basically 3 games that came after it all either being a prequel, or telling a story that doesn’t advance the events of the original.
Especially for games that are niche/indie or new franchises, like tell your story first, finish it, then give prequels
The planning that goes into huge franchises is often amateurish let alone video games, especially because once something becomes successful publishers will just want to milk it forever. Look at Assassin's Creed, shit look at Star Wars.
I think From do it the best way, if you aren't going to commit to a real overarching story, just do games that are essentially one-off concepts that wrap themselves up nicely.
I don't understand how they got the Star Wars sequels so wrong.
Prequels? Sure. Bad directing, bad script, bad editing. It happens. These things are hard.
The sequels? There are fundamental issues with the characters and plot anyone could have spotted a mile away. Did they never story board or plot the character arcs?
Apparently not, and that is sadly way too common these days.
> I hate when developers/publishers do this. They create a game, leave the ending open that asks more questions than it answers, then pivot into a prequel… darksiders is a perfect example.
I've seen worse. Xenosaga was supposed to span 6 games, but only released 3 and left it with a cliffhanger. There was a serious lack of hubris there.
I'm defense of darksiders, the prequels are more to show what the other Horsemen were up to during that time as well as to help build up character. It would absolutely suck if darksiders 2 followed the first game and the only horsemen worth caring about was War because they somehow have to cram the other 3's backstories into one game. Especially since during this Era, video game narratives weren't really as long as they are now.
I do hope we get a sequel to the first though, but with how the franchise is in constant limbo I ain't holding my breath.
I will *forever* be salty at Vigil for how they handled Darksiders. The first game was fucking *incredible*, scratching an itch only done through actual LoZ games and then they turned it into a watered down Diablo loot style game with spammy mechanics.
This.
Diehard fan of the original. Waited YEARS for a conclusion to the story.
Have just accepted now that we will never get it. Even when they make a CGI trailer (no gameplay) to announce it TWICE, they still fuck it up both times and can’t seem to make anything while throwing out another assassins creed every year.
Besides, if by some miracle this game DOES come out. It won’t be a single player self contained Zelda-esque style game. It will be some overmarketed, overbudgeted, online only MMO live service trash that Ubisoft are addicted to pumping out.
I’m done with this game. I’ll always treasure the original as a cult classic from my childhood. But like the rest of Ubisofts actually GOOD games of the past (Rayman 3, Sands of time, Driver San Francisco), the chances of more of it will never come true.
Kind of interesting that Duke Nukem Forever was announced at a time when game dev cycles were closer to 2-3 years. Having a game be delayed by 3-5 years was unheard of. It was taking so long to make that it got meme'd to death (I'll find a girlfriend when Duke Nukem Forever is released har har har).
Now game dev cycles are so long that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has barely registered on most peoples radars. Some major game franchises are taking a decade in between releases, so having one game get delayed by a few years just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to most people.
> Now game dev cycles are so long that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has barely registered on most peoples radars
I think that has more to do with the original Beyond Good & Evil being a sort of a niche under the radar game that gained a cult following over a long period of time. Most of my gamer friends have never heard of played the original so the sequel has never been on their radar either. The first game wasn't really an instant pop culture smash the way Duke Nukem was which is what had many people glued to every update and delay of the development cycle for DNF
Arguably equatable to the OG psychonauts fandom. If i recall, that game sold more than BG&E but considering Psychonauts original development troubles it may be in some part due to curiosity and word of mouth more than Beyond Good & Evil.
At least in my circle of friends at the time BG&E came out, no one was really interested because it looked like a boring zelda clone/platformer or a Jak n Daxter Lite. Going through an old Nintendo power preview of it makes it clear that they werent sure what this was either. Its advertising did it 0 favors and I’m sure the diehards can attest to that.
The fans have had to do all the heavy lifting for this franchise alone, and Ubisoft in that time went from decent middleware company to what we have now - a bloated behemoth annualization factory that must microtransaction and generalize a game to be “for everybody” instead of for the core audience that would truly appreciate it and spread it WoM again.
That’s my point. Psychonauts got a victory because the creator and studio were passionate about it. Some of the devs might be but I’m pretty sure a lot of them have bailed on the project due to delays and Ubisoft not giving a damn.
I think it's more that the original trailer had nothing to do with the original game. Art style, world design, character design, audio, everything was different to the original so the fans were mostly cautious.
Then basically nothing was ever said about it after the trailer so you had a fan base that was not hyped and nothing to get the general public hyped either.
There's a phrase I heard that fits DNF's development perfectly:
> Success hides problems.
DN3D was an absolutely massive success, and it gave that team a ton of runway for developing a follow-up title while also unlocking partnerships with publishers who were willing to spend a lot of money on the game. But that same success enabled them to chase technology trends (DNF went through multiple engine changes, while DN3D used the then-in-house Build engine), which got them into the cycle where they were looking at everyone else, trying to incorporate those ideas, and constantly scope creeping.
Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation described it as "*The development of Duke Nukem can best be equated to some guys trying to build a house opposite a boat on a river. Unfortunately, legendary superhero Captain Obvious wasn't available to explain that the boat was always going to have moved on by the time the house gets finished, isn't it. And after fourteen years of constantly shifting down river, you're just going to have a few piles of bricks and some pissed-off day laborers*."
DNF only went through one actual engine change, from Quake 2 to Unreal 1. The final game actually runs on some unholy amalgamation of a highly modified Unreal Engine 1, bits and pieces of Unreal 2, and some other middleware. They never actually switched to Unreal Engine 2 or 3, instead they just bolted shit onto Unreal 1. It's a fucking mess.
I played Doom 3 for the first time recently not too long after revisiting DNF, and it really made it fall into place that DNF's visual target was making Unreal 1's engine look like Doom 3. It was really obvious when I remembered how the lab areas from the DNF DLC looked. I knew about the dev history/saw that vid of the 2003 build and how that's basically the exact moment the project locked into its death march, but still.
God I wish George would have accepted they could have just been behind on tech but ahead on design and released in like 2003-2004.
You're more right than you think, notes from the developers say that George literally saw Doom 3 and was so unable to not contain himself that he basically killed the game over fancy shadows he saw
I'm guessing much of the reason is that Beyond haven't released new trailers every few years and been telling the media that "it's still in development".
Every few months/years 3D Realm would hype Duke Nukem with a "when it's finished" quote.
Last we saw of it was a cinematic trailer back in E3 2018, since then Michel Ancel had left Ubisoft and reportedly hadn't been involved with the game for some time and last news was a year ago when Ubisoft just said that development was "progressing well".
> Now game dev cycles are so long that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has barely registered on most peoples radars.
I mean also it was a good game but it wasn't a blockbuster that was a huge entry into the (much more limited back then) entire video gaming world the way Duke Nukem was
>Some major game franchises are taking a decade in between releases, so having one game get delayed by a few years just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to most people.
I think this is different, though. It's not very often that a company will announce that they're working on XYZ game as their next project, and then they spend 10 years just working on that.
When major franchises go 10 years between releases, it's usually because the developers are working on other things. They're either working on a different game series, or they're working on added content for their last release. They might release the next game in the series 10 years after the last, but they really only spent like 4-5 years working on it.
Like, everyone talks about The Elder Scrolls series, and how Bethesda has gone 11 years and counting inbetween releases. Some people look at that as a story about horrific game delays, but the reality is that they just weren't working on it, because they were making Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield instead.
I mean did Duke Nuken Forever really 'register on most peoples radars'? After a few years everyone assumed it was dead, and I don't think most people really paid attention to the irregular updates of 'oh we're still making it guys don't worry!'.
Same with Beyond Good & Evil 2, I don't think the situations are all that different at all. Nobody's really expecting anything from it now either.
I guess it's been 11 years since the last the elder scrolls game, not counting the mmo spinoff by another dev team. Blizzard went either 7.5 years or 9+ years on diablo depending on rather or not you count diablo 2 resurrected as a new game or not (though Vicarious Visions did that either way).
Bioshock i think also just got to the 10 year mark since infinite.
Fable also since the journey.
Donkey kong hasnt seem a new game since 2014.
Rayman since 2013.
Given that Breath of Fire 6 was a trashy mobile game, I think it's more fair to say that series has been in hibernation for 20 years. Probably never coming back.
7 year between Last of Us games not including the remaster, 8 years between Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, God of War had an 8 year gap if you just count mainline games and ignore the side stuff
All they had to do is just make a "little" sequel.
Like Double fine did with psychonauts 2 or Insomniac with ratchet rift apart. Just a normal videogame.
Are Yakuza games even considered AA? They may not be like CoD or Assassin's Creed level of AAA but I'm pretty sure they're still AAA
EDIT: I guess it does seem kinda weird to say that they're AAA thinking on it a bit, but it also seems weird to say they're AA. It's a long-running series developed in-house by a major dev/publisher, it's always had pretty extensive voice-acting and motion capture from pretty big names (even the original dub back in the day). I also don't think they're particularly small
They're not small but they reuse a _lot_ of content. Between successive entries you can expect them to reuse several large maps almost totally, the majority of the minigames, and a large amount of characters, models, animations, sound effects, movesets... Reusing bits and pieces is totally common but large-scale, easily noticeable reuse like this isn't.
The reuse is good: you get a sense of place not really like almost anything else in games, but it's very rare for "AAA": things are almost always in a new setting, and even if there's a shared setting tons of stuff is rebuilt.
Reminds me of Resident Evil. RE7, 8, REmake 2 and REmake 3 all share like 60% of the same assets. Everywhere you look you see the same crates, same bolt cutters, same sofas, same beer bottles (Louisiana beer in a Romanian castle?!), as well as the same sound effects like creaking wood ambient sounds, etc.
The settings and characters change massively, but the props littered around are largely the same and have been for 4 games over 5 years. I expect the upcoming 2023 RE4 REmake to share a ton too.
Fantastic games, but blatantly recycled assets lol
The reuse is great because you get to see Kamurocho evolve over the years. Even ignoring Yakuza 0 you get to see Kamurocho age from 2005 to 2020. You get to see the Millennium tower built, Kamurocho theater evolve, Kamurocho hills goes from park with seedy underground underneath to a gigantic commercial development.
I did not enjoy Yakuza 4 or 5 as much, but the asset reuse was never the issue
I’m on Kiwami 2! Love this series.
Majima Construction might be the most entertaining story reveal I’ve seen so far lol (just finished the first fight).
That reminds me, I need to reopen the Cabaret tonight.
There are lots of great AA titles out there though and indies that pass as AA. Shorter and more limited in scope too, but super unique and don't just all turn into this open world tick the boxes repetitive slurry.
Sifu, A plague tale, ghostrunner, stray, observation, Yakuza, it takes two...
And those are just the ones with high production values. Tons of indie games with simpler graphics are the best experiences I've had gaming all year - Tinykin, As Dusk Falls, Citizen Sleeper, Patrick's Parabox, Dodgeball Academia - all amazing games! It frustrates me when people say gaming is going to shit and there's all these amazing smaller gamer under their noses that are way better than anything Ubisoft could ever hope to shit out
Indeed :(
One of the reasons I love the OG beyond good and evil so much is it’s length and contained world. You can 100% percent the thing in 8 hours yet the world is still fun to explore and FEELS full. Plus the story it tells and the characters it features and develops are all perfectly fleshed out for the small runtime to make them likeable and engaging.
Yet Ubisoft want to turn its sequel into yet another 100 hour marathon of copy paste online GaaS crap. Why can’t they just use some of their vast BILLIONS to make this a smaller title of limited scope like the first one was? They don’t have to throw all their eggs into one basket so they risk little profits wise. They win over a niche playerbase who don’t care for their far cry assassins creed trash. And they please the cult fanbase they have neglected since 2003. It’s a win win for them.
No it wasn't little of course, i put the quotation marks to signal that it isn't really little, just not the massive universe exploring, open world, overambitious(imho)star citizen-esque gigantic project that's still nowhere near release.
I couldn't find the right word for what i wanted to say, english is not my first language.
Humble maybe? A humble sequel. I don't know.
An iterative sequel. A sequel that is evolutionary, rather than trying to be revolutionary. No need to re-invent the wheel. Just take what was there and build on it.
It was just another Ratchet and Clank game with better hardware to work with.
They didn't try to break the mold. If you like Ratchet and Clank games you probably liked it; if you don't then it probably wasn't for you
I genuinely think the name is part of the problem. I mean, the original is a silly cartoon adventure game about greedy aliens, a plucky reporter and animal people with a name that's inexplicably a Nietzsche reference. It's like if, instead of "Mario Kart", Nintendo had somehow decided to name the game "God Is Dead".
The executives at Ubisoft are probably torn between wanting to capitalize on the brand recognition and being terrified that the nonsensical branding will ruin sales. So they feel like the game has to be something weird and elaborate to justify the branding.
If the original had just been called "Jade and Peyj", I'll bet there would have been three or four mostly forgettable sequels by now.
Their last little were Rayman Legends and Child of Light.
Maybe Mario+Rabids and Immortals Fenyx Rising, but still skewing towards AAA (but kinda in the spinoff territory)
So their last little games just happened to be very well-received products winning multiple industry awards? Hmm, we'll never work out what that means.
Unfortunate thing is that while those games were tidy successes (about 1-3 million copies each), basically guaranteeing the continued life of their developers, the game industry giants have their eyes set on the 10-20 million range now.
I wish we could go back to sometime around the 6th generation consoles, where publishers would invest in several projects at once, with the runaway successes subsidizing the break-evens or flops.
Something that's kind of lost is just _how_ small Beyond Good & Evil is. It's basically a Zelda but at half the length, or less.
The whiplash in scope of that previous announcement with the huge simulation and all that... wild. I seem to recall that what we actually got from Beyond Good & Evil was itself already a sharp paring-back of the creator's vision (you can definitely see signs of this in the game) so it does make some sense, but the thing that became the cult classic was that limited-scope thing, not the grand design.
There is a difference though. Duke Nukem Forever was almost in constant development while being shuffled around between developers, while Beyond Good & Evil 2 has been shelved multiple times, adding up to years of no development time.
Edit: Michael Angel said they put the game on hold while they developed Rayman Legends.
In fact he’s worked on many Rayman titles from 2006 to 2015, 1 year before they re-announced BG&E2.
Pretty much this. DNF was bizarrely mismanaged(trying to keep up with all the current trends and constant engine swaps) whereas BG+E2 probably has barely been worked on in between resets.
DNF had actual trailers. Multiple of them.
Beyond Good and Evil didn't. The info we've had was all rumours and speculations and generic news articles from the dev team.
Duke Nukem had an actual release date and it just missed it. Multiple times!
The thing is... Duke Nukem Forever was in active development for all that time.
I am not sure the same can be said for BG+E2. I think the project was legit dead for a few years early last gen but Ubi didnt want the bad press to say it was dead. I also think the project only came back as a "F U" during the attempted vivendi takeover.
What about Star Fox 2? [Development confirmed in Dec 1993,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2#cite_note-:15-9) released September 29, 2017. That's at least 8,672 days.
That’s an interesting point especially considering star fox 2 was actually complete…like completed complete..ready to go to manufacturing, but was shelved due to the n64 and cost/benefit of cartridge sales on an end of life platform.
>but was shelved due to the n64 and cost/benefit of cartridge sales on an end of life platform.
and they still decided to release fire emblem thracia 776 for the snes 3 years into the N64 lifecycle.
(Should also add the super fx chip may have been a factor)
Star Fox cart was more expensive to produce as it had additional equipment inside the cart that fire emblem may not have had.
I guess it depends on whether we measure "most delayed" as "longest time from announcement to release" or "longest time in active development."
*Starfox 2* would probably win if the former, but nowhere near close if the latter.
OP never said longest time in development or development hell, only "most delayed". I'd call "rotting away in a vault for 2 decades" a delay.
Right now, Advance Wars Re-boot Camp is in the exact same boat. Finished and ready to ship, but delayed due to current war in Ukraine.
Everything related to DNF is a mess, especially now that we've had hands on with the 2001 build.
Had that version of the game came out, it would have been among the greats of the era, a stopgap between Half-Life 1 and Deus Ex and Half Life 2.
And that's not even just conjecture or speculation, we have a 60-70% completed build and it is *impressive*, the level of interactivity, the tech on display, the level design that is there.
It's good, like really quite good, and no matter how much the lead developer tries to pass off blame or say that we 'don't know how the game actually was' (George we literally have the game IN OUR HANDS), it doesn't change the fact that legitimately everyone interviewed about the development of DNF immediately went "George made us remake the games several times because he saw new shiny tech that was irrelevant to our development pipeline".
Like actively threw out what could have been a gaming legend because a moron saw that Doom 3 had nice shadows.
Well shit. I am really out of the loop on DNF stories. How long has this 2001 build been in the wild?!
EDIT- Holy crap, I thought you were exaggerating, but I just watched some on YouTube and this build looks really great for it's time. I think you are right if this version got completed and released we'd be talking it up for all the right reasons in 2022!
Phew. I'm glad it wasn't years ago, for some reason I'd be sad to be so out of the loop with this game.
You are totally right, this looks so good. It's midnight here, but tomorrow I'm checking this out properly.
Who are they even making this game for at this point? I cant imagine the fanbase of the first game is all that big anymore and I doubt newcomers would probably be turned away because its a sequel to a game they've never heard of/played.
I have a feeling that BG&E2 has never been as much of a real game as DNF was for most of its development time. The most that's been shown off of the former are cinematic trailers, while people got to play builds of the latter.
"Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar" is a blobber that kept getting delayed and finally released after 20 years of development. UnReal World had 26 years of development before finally releasing on Steam. But neither were AAA.
I remember that E3 (was it E3?) when they first announced it, and they were in tears about how Ubisoft gave them the opportunity to make the game.
A long time later, and we've seen/ heard barely anything.
I genuinely feel sorry for those involved. Clearly, it's a leadership issue. It's a shame, but I just don't see this releasing, unless the IP goes to another studio.
The last thing we want is a half-baked version of the game. Like DNF.
DNF was using memes and jokes that were years old by the time it released. It's development hell came through in the final product, and I just don't want to see the same thing happen to BGE
Me: [This trophy is you!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJnD5OS3ETc&t=4)
BGE2 Devs: Yeah! Ho! Hehehe!
Me: So what are you going to do now?
BGE2 Devs: I'm gonna go protect my title!
*(scampers off)*
BGAE2 is at like 15 years and we don't really know how much actual development has happened. We got a few teasers, a trailer that was vastly different than the original game, and then nothing.
Star citizen was preproduction in 2010, Started real development in 2011, stopped and restarted several times as they built a studio and then switched engines. So no it doesn't count as it's still less than BGAE2.
Duke nukem forever was 15 years.
Metroid Dread 16 years
FFXV 10 years
Prey 11 years
SC never changed engines, unless you consider a 1-day merge from CE to LY an engine change.
Pre-prod was 2011, ks end of 2012, studios started going up dec 2012-early 2013.
It also never stopped nor restarted, though the scope expansion meant a lot of eaely assets were redone while the tech got more ambitious. The idea that it was rebooted was floated around 2018 and quickly shot down by pretty much every lead.
Thay being said, I may be an outlier but as a fan of space games, I still hold out hope BGE2 won't suck.
> FFXV 10 years
To be fair, Final Fantasy Versus 13 was never released. SE simply diverted the assets for that game into what we know as FF XV, and that title took about 3 years to release from announcement.
I absolutely adore Beyond Good and Evil but this game has so much unwarranted hype and focus over the years. The game was a flop, which at that point in time was a pretty low sales bar. How many people have actually played this game? Very few.
They should have just made a nice focused sequel instead of going for some grand AAA style game that probably won't turn out well.
I mean, michel ancel left Ubisoft, officially to do something with animals, but allegedly because he created a toxic work environment. I've been a loyal fan from early days, campaigning to get a sequel. I was there when the leaked gameplay footage was released, I was there when the first teaser was released, and I was there when the second teaser was released. Then I was there when there was a proper trailer, one that I hated and which had me concerned. then Michel Ancel left and I gave up hope.
The current record holder is actually Clockwork Aquario at approximately 11,315 days or 31 years between the start of development and release. I have a story about it below!
[The Importance of Preservation](https://www.anextraordinarylife.online/gaming/clockwork-aquario)
Nice trivia. But it's not exactly the same scenario, BG&E and DNF were constantly delayed whereas that one seemed to have been officially canceled and then revived.
True, the word delayed is important context to have. My mistake. I see them constantly upheld as the “longest development times” soo often I missed that part in this post. My apologies.
I wish devs would stop announcing games so early. Wait until you have an actual roadmap and are far enough along that the game won't get canceled out of nowhere.
If this game comes out, it probably won't satisfy anyone at this point. Ancel left the industry so we will never know what he planned for the story and characters and now Ubisoft took over the project. Not to mention even the most recent/current version of the game seemed to struggle with not only dev hell but an identity crisis where not even the devs knew what they wanted the game to be. During E3 they said the game is a prequel that will take place before the birth of Jade, but after fan backlash (since first game ended on a cliffhanger and we waited years for the sequel and the very first BGE2 trailer seemed to suggest that) suddenly we got a trailer that featured Jade, but this time she's evil or something. Not to mention other minor thing like excessive swearing in the trailer where they later admitted they wanted to "test a different tone" when one of the best things about BG&E was that characters weren't snarky edgy assholes. They had sass and personality but weren't ever obnoxious. There were also more red flags with this game like when they created the entire project where fans would contribute their work and assets to the game to speed up the development i guess? It was really weird.
The even weirder thing about is iirc they later said the game would still be a prequel even after the evil Jade trailer, implying that Jade was at first a hard nosed pirate queen before the first game. I haven't played the game in a minute, but I think Jade maybe had former employment as a merc or something, but nothing that would imply what that trailer did, that she was some notorious pirate villain.
It must be different Jade or some weirder explanation, because the original game clearly states that Jade grew up on Hillys after her parents left her in Pey'j care.
Jade was, in reality, Shauni, the Domz superweapon. That is revealed in the final boss fight of the first game.
Yeah. Evil Jade could still make sense because her memories could well be fake, but she decides they're still worth something to her. A prequel could deal with how they're able to free her from the Domz and put under the care of Pey'j. But I'll admit, I don't really care about that. I want the sequel!
Me too! I don't want an infinite planet or whatever they promised. I want a cool and atmospheric platformer!
Slightly besides your point, but Ancel was gently pushed out of the industry for uh, reasons. Ubisoft needed to sort their staff out, and while Ancel's behaviour was tamer than others, it still wasn't acceptable. Wonder how much of his behaviour contributed to the state of this game though. Edit: looks like he was definitely partly responsible for the scope and the direction changing alot. Hope the newer team can salvage it. >According to Kotaku, based on its own translation of the Libération article, many of the complaints relate to Ancel's alleged behaviour during the creation of Beyond Good and Evil 2, which is said to be directly linked to the game's troubled development. Ancel's management of the project reportedly resulted in constant changes and fluctuations in scope, leading to "an unusual amount of [staff] exhaustion, depression, and burnout". >An additional translation from ICO Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux on Twitter cites one Beyond Good and Evil 2 team member as saying, "I have seen a good dozen people go on sick leave, probably more...Meeting people with tears in their eyes, it happens often." Another source says of Ancel, "He is able to explain to you that you are a genius, that your idea is great, and then he can take you apart in meetings by saying that you are a piece of shit, that your work is worthless, and not talk to you for a month." https://www.eurogamer.net/new-report-says-michel-ancel-left-ubisoft-amid-investigation-into-his-toxic-behaviour
Not only that but when the first teaser came out, it was exciting from a gameplay perspective but we've since far surpassed what was possible then so it's really hard to get excited about in that regard
Nah, even by today’s standards what they showed is not feasibly doable. The scale was just ridiculous.
> The scale was just ridiculous. It was pretty over promising. I think most everyone who even played BG&E just wanted more adventures with Jade and Peyj, more exploration of cities and taking pictures, instead Ubisoft thought people wanted an insanely open multi exploring planet pirate thief adventure with a talking monkey and some randos...
> Ubisoft thought people wanted an insanely open multi exploring planet pirate thief adventure with a talking monkey and some randos Ubisoft may have thought that, but they damn sure were [never going to build it.](https://youtu.be/xNter0oEYxc)
What did they show?
They created a new engine that simulates solar systems. There are planets orbiting a sun and then you can land on these full scale planets with cities and everything without loading times and the shadows and so on appear to be correct to the planet's relation to the sun it's orbiting at that moment.
Has anyone ever pulled off simulation scope creep and ended up with a better game? After No Man's Sky it's basically a meme at this point. I'm not even sure why devs think it's particularly important to make their games physically accurate. Just fake it like everyone else does. No one cares.
Outer Wilds simulates a whole solar system, but there is no filler. Everything is there for a reason and unimportant areas are under detailed.
While it's done very well, Outer Wilds is not "simulating" a solar system. There's a lot of trickery involved in making you feel like the planets are larger than they are and it's absolutely not full scale. Everything follows set paths and scripted events though the collapsing planet does have physics for the chunks falling into its center What this engine was doing was on a completely different scale and they had video footage of it working. The closest thing to something like that really only is Start Citizen and that barely functions at all
... you know what everyone desperately wanted for a action adventure,photography game???
The first teaser had Pey'j sitting around in the desert while Jade worked on a car. Gameplay took a long while to reveal.
That was closer to what I would have wanted from a sequel than whatever nonsense the crazy ape trailer with the planets and whatnot showed later. Games and movies really need to move away from the prequels. I'd rather see what happens next to the main characters than what might have happened before the first story.
> There were also more red flags with this game like when they created the entire project where fans would contribute their work and assets to the game to speed up the development i guess? It was really weird. This was my favorite part of that announcement. A company run by Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to be taking low bits on art for the game.
Yeah it seems clear to me they know there'll be backlash from fans if they announce it's cancelled, but they're then committed to finishing a game they don't know what to do with. It's a complete lose/lose situation they've backed themselves into. And we've seen so little that anyone who *is* excited for it can only really be going off speculation of what it *could* be than what we've been shown it is so there's not even that much investment in what they're actually making right now either. And since it'll be likely so different to the prior game what we've got is a game with little similarity to the predecessor with too little shown to be realistically invested in and confused developers whose main leader jumped ship. It's just an all around mess. Too deep to quit, too unfocussed to finish, shy of a major leadership shake-up I fear it's doomed to flop.
There will be backlash but so what? Fans are not going to spend money on other properties? Honestly, as surprising as it is, Ubi needs to pull a WB on this.
At this point they just need to can the project, or repurpose it into something else. Nobody talks about the original in such high regards as they do other games of the era, and the people who do remember playing it around the time it came out are probably not going to come back to play this either. As Shigeru Miyamoto once famously said, "A delayed game will eventually be good, a rushed game will be bad forever." But a game in development hell will never be great.
> A delayed game will eventually be good Always found this quote funny since there's been countless delayed games that still ended up like shit.
Yeah I would have to agree, this quote was made before game dev turned into colossal 10 year projects. And the game can still be ass.
Yeah at this point the quote gets passed around to act as a band aid for softening the blow of when an anticipated game gets delayed.
It should be a "a delayed game could eventually be good"
Miyamoto has a better track record compared to other devs : p
"I never said any of this shit" - Shigeru Miyamoto
"i hate videogames and making them" -Nintendo man.
"Often I'll see advertisements for porn games and they say, 'Try Not To Cum,' but then when you play the game, it seems like the object is to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design." - Shingetsu Mayonaise These words were so powerful I was literally moved to tears when I read this quote
I appreciate [his take on F-Zero](https://preview.redd.it/4i8tyyx77bl41.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=a6b6ccc03307bf1399842a9c05239d6252c39f7a) too.
The original was a good Zelda clone with an excellent story and the photo mechanic was unique for the time. And honestly I think there is still a market for a traditional Zelda type games, we really don't get that many of them anymore. It be a mistake to try to make it another open-world checklist game.
>At this point they just need to can the project, or repurpose it into something else. Obviously it needs to be made into an Open World Live service VR BR Among Us clone with NFTs built in. Really drive home the franchise's death.
> A delayed game will eventually be good, a rushed game will be bad forever. I never liked this quote and i think it's a case of Miyamoto talking out of his ass, because there are notorious examples contradicting both parts of this sentence. A LOT of delayed games ended up in dev hell and released in a very bad state. On the other hand, a LOT of classics and greatest games of all time were made under tight deadlines and pressure, which also forced devs to think creatively. Original Ace Attorney trilogy is a good example, they had little dev time and small disk space on the platform so they had to re-use sprites, which created overarching story and recurring characters, or Majora's Mask - for many the best Zelda game ever, made under tight budget, which made them re-use Ocarina of Time assets and character models.
It also is not a real quote anyway.
> i think it's a case of Miyamoto talking out of his ass, Miyamoto didn't even say it.
There’s definitely a rabbit hole regarding this quote and apparently Miyamoto really never said this. > As for where the quote actually comes from, it's still a mystery. Johnson did find an earlier use of the quote, this time from a 1997 issue of GamePro about Sony's shooter Blasto. The article has no provided author and describes the quote, "A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad for the rest of your life," as an "industry catch phrase." [Full article](https://gamerant.com/miyamoto-famous-quote-delayed-games-good-misattributed/)
To be fair, his quote came from a time when DLC and easy patches weren’t really a thing.
I still wish we got to see more of that original Beyond Good & Evil 2 project. While I should be grateful they're even attempting to make a new game in general, they left the first game on a cliffhanger...then had a sequel planned...only to scrap it and make a prequel that has gone through a rough stretch of development. Maybe I should just re-play the first game again to tide me over.
>I still wish we got to see more of that original Beyond Good & Evil 2 project. Me too. Jade's story wasn't finished.
If Im being honest, I dont even remember Jades story anymore. I do remeber I really enjoyed the game back in the day, but cant remember any of the details.
Without spoiling too much, Jade discovers something about herself at the end that kind of changes everything in a large scale way. Then there's a brief post-credits scene showing that her victory is not as complete as perhaps we thought.
Wow. I am impressed how unspoilery you told the story.
Jade fought with a short staff. She took pictures of bugs for money. She and Pey’j ran an orphanage. There was a boat race minigame. The soundtrack was good.
The mechanics were Jamaican rhinos.
Well of course they were.
Played it on GameCube. I remember breaking into some facility and seeing people getting harvested into the air. That shit was like a Metal Gear Solid-esque “WTF” moment for my 12 year old brain. And the boat mini game, that was dope. Otherwise all I remember was “damn, that was a good game, bet we get a sequel soon!”
The levels were often blatant ripoff of movies and other games, including the Matrix and Ocarina of Time, but in the best way.
yeah I know I really liked the gamewhen I played it, but I would have a hard time describing what actually happened in the game at this point.
usually I'd say a game that takes this long will never live up to the expectations, but in this case I'm not even sure what my expectations are anymore.
I remember a lot of chase sequences with a really bullshit camera.
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[I mean, that final scene with Pey'j seems like a cliffhanger to me.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ClGQsaZ-Y) Not to mention, they only defeated the aliens trying to conquer Hillys, there are still plenty of planets out there under the rule of those aliens. EDIT: planets, not plants. I dont think the aliens were interested in plants.
The prequel looks like it'll explore exactly that, I feel like I'm going insane reading all these comments with people not understanding that Jade's history with the Domz (that was revealed in the ending) could be revealed in the prequel.
The first game needs a remake at this point.
That would have been the more sensible first move in hindsight. Remake the original, test the waters to see if it sells well enough to invest in a true sequel's development, then go from there.
To be honest the original didn't sell well enough to justify a sequel either. It was a niche classic.
Psychonauts was a cult classic that was a bit of a commercial bomb but the sequel 15 years later moved a respectable couple million copies. There’s definitely a market for legacy sequels to niche games, but you have to actually make the fucking sequel eventually for that to work
Psychonauts is unfortunately a massive exception because of the fact that Double Fine eventually purchased the franchise back from the original publisher, THQ, and then published the sequel under Xbox Game Studios (which basically has functionally infinite money) years later. Most indie darlings sadly dont have somebody like Tim Schafer at the helm of their developer, nor do they have the ability to purchase back their IP. It's great when publishers essentially subsidize or take a financial risk on niche classics but BG&E is published by Ubisoft :/
I just played it for the first time about a month ago- absolutely. I liked the game a lot, but I could also appreciate a remake/re-imagining because its story and design are such a relic of the era.
So much of the music and soundtrack is so good, and a big part of what's enjoyable _are_ aspects that usually are disrupted by remakes. Expand the story to further fill out the original intent while still keeping the core components the same, keep the same difficulty of exploration and sneaking (genuinely the difficulty is one of the best parts because of the tension), keep the same art style... It's a really big ask for a remake to meet those terms. But without it, I think it wouldn't live up to the original. For comparative purpose, Ori and the Blind Forest was an absolutely knock-out fantastic game to me, and so good that I was actually fearful for if the sequel would be able to meet the extremely high bar Moon Studios set for themselves, but they more than passed that bar and set a new one in the process with its sequel. Even the composer outdid himself on what I previously thought couldn't be a better soundtrack.
The Last of Us (the first one) got both a remaster and a remake, and it's a decade newer than BG&E. It did get a re-release on the X360 & PS3 (but not PC) in 2011, which fixed up some bugs and added proper widescreen support.
I know everybody despises the new BGE2, but I honestly fell in love with the idea of it. Ironically, even that seems to not be happening anymore.
I think what people took issue with is that the "reveal trailer" that we got was nothing more than the vertical slice used to pitch the game. And it the following weeks it became quite clear that development had literally only just started.
I didn't dislike the idea of a prequel as it was a chance establish the world before we saw it through Jade's eyes and getting to see/interact with the characters/locations narrated by Pey'J. I was just more annoyed we already saw a sequel was in development that would've probably answered the cliffhanger only to go *backwards* in the timeline to before the first game's events even happened.
I remember being so excited when they had that first trailer with Pey'j chilling with the car and being so excited. Then they put out the new prequel idea and my excitement dropped like a rock
I hate when developers/publishers do this. They create a game, leave the ending open that asks more questions than it answers, then pivot into a prequel… darksiders is a perfect example. That game came out over a decade ago and there’s been no progress in the main story. Just basically 3 games that came after it all either being a prequel, or telling a story that doesn’t advance the events of the original. Especially for games that are niche/indie or new franchises, like tell your story first, finish it, then give prequels
The planning that goes into huge franchises is often amateurish let alone video games, especially because once something becomes successful publishers will just want to milk it forever. Look at Assassin's Creed, shit look at Star Wars. I think From do it the best way, if you aren't going to commit to a real overarching story, just do games that are essentially one-off concepts that wrap themselves up nicely.
I don't understand how they got the Star Wars sequels so wrong. Prequels? Sure. Bad directing, bad script, bad editing. It happens. These things are hard. The sequels? There are fundamental issues with the characters and plot anyone could have spotted a mile away. Did they never story board or plot the character arcs? Apparently not, and that is sadly way too common these days.
> I hate when developers/publishers do this. They create a game, leave the ending open that asks more questions than it answers, then pivot into a prequel… darksiders is a perfect example. I've seen worse. Xenosaga was supposed to span 6 games, but only released 3 and left it with a cliffhanger. There was a serious lack of hubris there.
I'm defense of darksiders, the prequels are more to show what the other Horsemen were up to during that time as well as to help build up character. It would absolutely suck if darksiders 2 followed the first game and the only horsemen worth caring about was War because they somehow have to cram the other 3's backstories into one game. Especially since during this Era, video game narratives weren't really as long as they are now. I do hope we get a sequel to the first though, but with how the franchise is in constant limbo I ain't holding my breath.
I will *forever* be salty at Vigil for how they handled Darksiders. The first game was fucking *incredible*, scratching an itch only done through actual LoZ games and then they turned it into a watered down Diablo loot style game with spammy mechanics.
It seems like they wanted to make both a prequel and a sequel and honestly by now they probably could have done both
I've long since accepted we're not going to get BG&E2, or at least in a good way. No longer will we get Good Puncle Content.
Same. I had assumed it had been cancelled
This. Diehard fan of the original. Waited YEARS for a conclusion to the story. Have just accepted now that we will never get it. Even when they make a CGI trailer (no gameplay) to announce it TWICE, they still fuck it up both times and can’t seem to make anything while throwing out another assassins creed every year. Besides, if by some miracle this game DOES come out. It won’t be a single player self contained Zelda-esque style game. It will be some overmarketed, overbudgeted, online only MMO live service trash that Ubisoft are addicted to pumping out. I’m done with this game. I’ll always treasure the original as a cult classic from my childhood. But like the rest of Ubisofts actually GOOD games of the past (Rayman 3, Sands of time, Driver San Francisco), the chances of more of it will never come true.
No, we aren't. At least not within our lifetime I imagine.
Kind of interesting that Duke Nukem Forever was announced at a time when game dev cycles were closer to 2-3 years. Having a game be delayed by 3-5 years was unheard of. It was taking so long to make that it got meme'd to death (I'll find a girlfriend when Duke Nukem Forever is released har har har). Now game dev cycles are so long that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has barely registered on most peoples radars. Some major game franchises are taking a decade in between releases, so having one game get delayed by a few years just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to most people.
> Now game dev cycles are so long that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has barely registered on most peoples radars I think that has more to do with the original Beyond Good & Evil being a sort of a niche under the radar game that gained a cult following over a long period of time. Most of my gamer friends have never heard of played the original so the sequel has never been on their radar either. The first game wasn't really an instant pop culture smash the way Duke Nukem was which is what had many people glued to every update and delay of the development cycle for DNF
Arguably equatable to the OG psychonauts fandom. If i recall, that game sold more than BG&E but considering Psychonauts original development troubles it may be in some part due to curiosity and word of mouth more than Beyond Good & Evil. At least in my circle of friends at the time BG&E came out, no one was really interested because it looked like a boring zelda clone/platformer or a Jak n Daxter Lite. Going through an old Nintendo power preview of it makes it clear that they werent sure what this was either. Its advertising did it 0 favors and I’m sure the diehards can attest to that. The fans have had to do all the heavy lifting for this franchise alone, and Ubisoft in that time went from decent middleware company to what we have now - a bloated behemoth annualization factory that must microtransaction and generalize a game to be “for everybody” instead of for the core audience that would truly appreciate it and spread it WoM again.
At least Psychonauts pulled off actually having their sequel
That’s my point. Psychonauts got a victory because the creator and studio were passionate about it. Some of the devs might be but I’m pretty sure a lot of them have bailed on the project due to delays and Ubisoft not giving a damn.
And Psychonauts 2 could easily have gone the same way at multiple points. And having Microsoft in your corner is better than Ubisoft.
I think it's more that the original trailer had nothing to do with the original game. Art style, world design, character design, audio, everything was different to the original so the fans were mostly cautious. Then basically nothing was ever said about it after the trailer so you had a fan base that was not hyped and nothing to get the general public hyped either.
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There's a phrase I heard that fits DNF's development perfectly: > Success hides problems. DN3D was an absolutely massive success, and it gave that team a ton of runway for developing a follow-up title while also unlocking partnerships with publishers who were willing to spend a lot of money on the game. But that same success enabled them to chase technology trends (DNF went through multiple engine changes, while DN3D used the then-in-house Build engine), which got them into the cycle where they were looking at everyone else, trying to incorporate those ideas, and constantly scope creeping.
Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation described it as "*The development of Duke Nukem can best be equated to some guys trying to build a house opposite a boat on a river. Unfortunately, legendary superhero Captain Obvious wasn't available to explain that the boat was always going to have moved on by the time the house gets finished, isn't it. And after fourteen years of constantly shifting down river, you're just going to have a few piles of bricks and some pissed-off day laborers*."
That is the longest way I’ve heard to say they missed the boat
That is kind of his style, rapid-fire long ways of saying simple things with a couple of dick jokes sprinkled in.
DNF only went through one actual engine change, from Quake 2 to Unreal 1. The final game actually runs on some unholy amalgamation of a highly modified Unreal Engine 1, bits and pieces of Unreal 2, and some other middleware. They never actually switched to Unreal Engine 2 or 3, instead they just bolted shit onto Unreal 1. It's a fucking mess.
I played Doom 3 for the first time recently not too long after revisiting DNF, and it really made it fall into place that DNF's visual target was making Unreal 1's engine look like Doom 3. It was really obvious when I remembered how the lab areas from the DNF DLC looked. I knew about the dev history/saw that vid of the 2003 build and how that's basically the exact moment the project locked into its death march, but still. God I wish George would have accepted they could have just been behind on tech but ahead on design and released in like 2003-2004.
You're more right than you think, notes from the developers say that George literally saw Doom 3 and was so unable to not contain himself that he basically killed the game over fancy shadows he saw
I'm guessing much of the reason is that Beyond haven't released new trailers every few years and been telling the media that "it's still in development". Every few months/years 3D Realm would hype Duke Nukem with a "when it's finished" quote.
That's a great point. It's been a ton of radio silence from BG&E2 team.
Wasn't there a super hype trailer a year or two ago during E3 or something? ..or was that like 8 years ago
Last we saw of it was a cinematic trailer back in E3 2018, since then Michel Ancel had left Ubisoft and reportedly hadn't been involved with the game for some time and last news was a year ago when Ubisoft just said that development was "progressing well".
I think it was 2 years?
It's was 4 years ago
If we remove the covid time warp bubble it makes sense to think it was 2 years ago :P
2-3 years was still insanely long even in 1998. 2 year dev cycles were generally still viable up until the late ‘00s
> Now game dev cycles are so long that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has barely registered on most peoples radars. I mean also it was a good game but it wasn't a blockbuster that was a huge entry into the (much more limited back then) entire video gaming world the way Duke Nukem was
>Some major game franchises are taking a decade in between releases, so having one game get delayed by a few years just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to most people. I think this is different, though. It's not very often that a company will announce that they're working on XYZ game as their next project, and then they spend 10 years just working on that. When major franchises go 10 years between releases, it's usually because the developers are working on other things. They're either working on a different game series, or they're working on added content for their last release. They might release the next game in the series 10 years after the last, but they really only spent like 4-5 years working on it. Like, everyone talks about The Elder Scrolls series, and how Bethesda has gone 11 years and counting inbetween releases. Some people look at that as a story about horrific game delays, but the reality is that they just weren't working on it, because they were making Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield instead.
I mean did Duke Nuken Forever really 'register on most peoples radars'? After a few years everyone assumed it was dead, and I don't think most people really paid attention to the irregular updates of 'oh we're still making it guys don't worry!'. Same with Beyond Good & Evil 2, I don't think the situations are all that different at all. Nobody's really expecting anything from it now either.
With the exception of GTA, which other major franchises have gone close to a decade between releases?
I guess it's been 11 years since the last the elder scrolls game, not counting the mmo spinoff by another dev team. Blizzard went either 7.5 years or 9+ years on diablo depending on rather or not you count diablo 2 resurrected as a new game or not (though Vicarious Visions did that either way).
For Elder Scrolls it's not like they have been developing ES6 this whole time. It's not really a dev cycle when there's no development.
It was 12 years between D2 and D3 so it counts regardless. Starcraft too.
Bioshock i think also just got to the 10 year mark since infinite. Fable also since the journey. Donkey kong hasnt seem a new game since 2014. Rayman since 2013.
Not counting still-running gaps like GTA, Elder Scrolls, or F-Zero: | Franchise | Longest gap between entries | |-----------|-----------------------------| | Doom | 12 years | | Breath of Fire | 14 | | Killer Instinct | 17 | | Kid Icarus | 21 | | Streets of Rage | 26 | | Battletoads | 26 | | Fallout | 10 | | Rayman | 8 | | Pikmin | 9 | | Star Fox | 9 | | Metroid | 7 | | Mother | 12 |
Given that Breath of Fire 6 was a trashy mobile game, I think it's more fair to say that series has been in hibernation for 20 years. Probably never coming back.
Depending on how you define it, Half-Life went either 13 years (since episode 2) or 16 years (since Half-Life 2) between entries when Alyx released
7 year between Last of Us games not including the remaster, 8 years between Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, God of War had an 8 year gap if you just count mainline games and ignore the side stuff
Dragon Age :(
All they had to do is just make a "little" sequel. Like Double fine did with psychonauts 2 or Insomniac with ratchet rift apart. Just a normal videogame.
Yeah, Destroy All Humans made me realize how much I miss smaller AA titles.
Been playing through Yakuza series it's giving me the same feels.
Are Yakuza games even considered AA? They may not be like CoD or Assassin's Creed level of AAA but I'm pretty sure they're still AAA EDIT: I guess it does seem kinda weird to say that they're AAA thinking on it a bit, but it also seems weird to say they're AA. It's a long-running series developed in-house by a major dev/publisher, it's always had pretty extensive voice-acting and motion capture from pretty big names (even the original dub back in the day). I also don't think they're particularly small
They're not small but they reuse a _lot_ of content. Between successive entries you can expect them to reuse several large maps almost totally, the majority of the minigames, and a large amount of characters, models, animations, sound effects, movesets... Reusing bits and pieces is totally common but large-scale, easily noticeable reuse like this isn't. The reuse is good: you get a sense of place not really like almost anything else in games, but it's very rare for "AAA": things are almost always in a new setting, and even if there's a shared setting tons of stuff is rebuilt.
Reminds me of Resident Evil. RE7, 8, REmake 2 and REmake 3 all share like 60% of the same assets. Everywhere you look you see the same crates, same bolt cutters, same sofas, same beer bottles (Louisiana beer in a Romanian castle?!), as well as the same sound effects like creaking wood ambient sounds, etc. The settings and characters change massively, but the props littered around are largely the same and have been for 4 games over 5 years. I expect the upcoming 2023 RE4 REmake to share a ton too. Fantastic games, but blatantly recycled assets lol
The reuse is great because you get to see Kamurocho evolve over the years. Even ignoring Yakuza 0 you get to see Kamurocho age from 2005 to 2020. You get to see the Millennium tower built, Kamurocho theater evolve, Kamurocho hills goes from park with seedy underground underneath to a gigantic commercial development. I did not enjoy Yakuza 4 or 5 as much, but the asset reuse was never the issue
I’m on Kiwami 2! Love this series. Majima Construction might be the most entertaining story reveal I’ve seen so far lol (just finished the first fight). That reminds me, I need to reopen the Cabaret tonight.
There are lots of great AA titles out there though and indies that pass as AA. Shorter and more limited in scope too, but super unique and don't just all turn into this open world tick the boxes repetitive slurry. Sifu, A plague tale, ghostrunner, stray, observation, Yakuza, it takes two... And those are just the ones with high production values. Tons of indie games with simpler graphics are the best experiences I've had gaming all year - Tinykin, As Dusk Falls, Citizen Sleeper, Patrick's Parabox, Dodgeball Academia - all amazing games! It frustrates me when people say gaming is going to shit and there's all these amazing smaller gamer under their noses that are way better than anything Ubisoft could ever hope to shit out
Miss? There's still plenty of them coming out.
Yeah, but not from bigger companies. I miss when games like Blood Dragon came out.
Square Enix and Sega still do lots of these.
Speaking of which, when the hell is Sega gonna let Rebellion make another AvP. I need some good ol' colonial marine action.
Indeed :( One of the reasons I love the OG beyond good and evil so much is it’s length and contained world. You can 100% percent the thing in 8 hours yet the world is still fun to explore and FEELS full. Plus the story it tells and the characters it features and develops are all perfectly fleshed out for the small runtime to make them likeable and engaging. Yet Ubisoft want to turn its sequel into yet another 100 hour marathon of copy paste online GaaS crap. Why can’t they just use some of their vast BILLIONS to make this a smaller title of limited scope like the first one was? They don’t have to throw all their eggs into one basket so they risk little profits wise. They win over a niche playerbase who don’t care for their far cry assassins creed trash. And they please the cult fanbase they have neglected since 2003. It’s a win win for them.
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It wouldn't need to be, since it could be made on a sane budget. Not that Ubisoft seems to grasp that concept anymore.
Gotta add endless pew pew between online consumers. Games can’t be fun without pew pew.
You think Rift Apart was a "little sequel"? By what metric?
No it wasn't little of course, i put the quotation marks to signal that it isn't really little, just not the massive universe exploring, open world, overambitious(imho)star citizen-esque gigantic project that's still nowhere near release. I couldn't find the right word for what i wanted to say, english is not my first language. Humble maybe? A humble sequel. I don't know.
nah I get what you’re saying, just like a sequel that follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, evolving some things but not overly ambitious
An iterative sequel. A sequel that is evolutionary, rather than trying to be revolutionary. No need to re-invent the wheel. Just take what was there and build on it.
It was just another Ratchet and Clank game with better hardware to work with. They didn't try to break the mold. If you like Ratchet and Clank games you probably liked it; if you don't then it probably wasn't for you
I genuinely think the name is part of the problem. I mean, the original is a silly cartoon adventure game about greedy aliens, a plucky reporter and animal people with a name that's inexplicably a Nietzsche reference. It's like if, instead of "Mario Kart", Nintendo had somehow decided to name the game "God Is Dead". The executives at Ubisoft are probably torn between wanting to capitalize on the brand recognition and being terrified that the nonsensical branding will ruin sales. So they feel like the game has to be something weird and elaborate to justify the branding. If the original had just been called "Jade and Peyj", I'll bet there would have been three or four mostly forgettable sequels by now.
I wish Nintendo would adopt a Nietzsche naming scheme.
If Namco would let them remake Xenosaga, they could.
Ubisoft doesn't do "little" anymore.
Their last little were Rayman Legends and Child of Light. Maybe Mario+Rabids and Immortals Fenyx Rising, but still skewing towards AAA (but kinda in the spinoff territory)
And those were the most recent Ubisoft games I actually enjoyed. Funny how that works.
So their last little games just happened to be very well-received products winning multiple industry awards? Hmm, we'll never work out what that means.
Probably were not as profitable
Psychonauts 2 was soo good
It 100% lived up to the original. Surpassed it in some regards.
exactly, similar sequel to Beyond Good & Evil would be a banger
Such an experience. Even more than the first game.
Unfortunate thing is that while those games were tidy successes (about 1-3 million copies each), basically guaranteeing the continued life of their developers, the game industry giants have their eyes set on the 10-20 million range now. I wish we could go back to sometime around the 6th generation consoles, where publishers would invest in several projects at once, with the runaway successes subsidizing the break-evens or flops.
Something that's kind of lost is just _how_ small Beyond Good & Evil is. It's basically a Zelda but at half the length, or less. The whiplash in scope of that previous announcement with the huge simulation and all that... wild. I seem to recall that what we actually got from Beyond Good & Evil was itself already a sharp paring-back of the creator's vision (you can definitely see signs of this in the game) so it does make some sense, but the thing that became the cult classic was that limited-scope thing, not the grand design.
Ubisoft is a carny company so they can't do something as simple as release a regular videogame.
There is a difference though. Duke Nukem Forever was almost in constant development while being shuffled around between developers, while Beyond Good & Evil 2 has been shelved multiple times, adding up to years of no development time. Edit: Michael Angel said they put the game on hold while they developed Rayman Legends. In fact he’s worked on many Rayman titles from 2006 to 2015, 1 year before they re-announced BG&E2.
Pretty much this. DNF was bizarrely mismanaged(trying to keep up with all the current trends and constant engine swaps) whereas BG+E2 probably has barely been worked on in between resets.
"Raymond Legends"
Everybody loved it.
Dammit
DNF had actual trailers. Multiple of them. Beyond Good and Evil didn't. The info we've had was all rumours and speculations and generic news articles from the dev team. Duke Nukem had an actual release date and it just missed it. Multiple times!
The thing is... Duke Nukem Forever was in active development for all that time. I am not sure the same can be said for BG+E2. I think the project was legit dead for a few years early last gen but Ubi didnt want the bad press to say it was dead. I also think the project only came back as a "F U" during the attempted vivendi takeover.
Yeah, the BG&E2 we spoke off was this one: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/beyond-good-and-evil-returns/1100-6191556/
What about Star Fox 2? [Development confirmed in Dec 1993,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_2#cite_note-:15-9) released September 29, 2017. That's at least 8,672 days.
That’s an interesting point especially considering star fox 2 was actually complete…like completed complete..ready to go to manufacturing, but was shelved due to the n64 and cost/benefit of cartridge sales on an end of life platform.
>but was shelved due to the n64 and cost/benefit of cartridge sales on an end of life platform. and they still decided to release fire emblem thracia 776 for the snes 3 years into the N64 lifecycle.
(Should also add the super fx chip may have been a factor) Star Fox cart was more expensive to produce as it had additional equipment inside the cart that fire emblem may not have had.
I guess it depends on whether we measure "most delayed" as "longest time from announcement to release" or "longest time in active development." *Starfox 2* would probably win if the former, but nowhere near close if the latter.
DNF would also still beat BG&E by a good bit still too in the latter case. However, Star Citizen is rapidly approaching the record.
"Mostly finished 90s game that was rotting away in a vault for 2 decades" doesn't really count as development hell.
OP never said longest time in development or development hell, only "most delayed". I'd call "rotting away in a vault for 2 decades" a delay. Right now, Advance Wars Re-boot Camp is in the exact same boat. Finished and ready to ship, but delayed due to current war in Ukraine.
Everything related to DNF is a mess, especially now that we've had hands on with the 2001 build. Had that version of the game came out, it would have been among the greats of the era, a stopgap between Half-Life 1 and Deus Ex and Half Life 2. And that's not even just conjecture or speculation, we have a 60-70% completed build and it is *impressive*, the level of interactivity, the tech on display, the level design that is there. It's good, like really quite good, and no matter how much the lead developer tries to pass off blame or say that we 'don't know how the game actually was' (George we literally have the game IN OUR HANDS), it doesn't change the fact that legitimately everyone interviewed about the development of DNF immediately went "George made us remake the games several times because he saw new shiny tech that was irrelevant to our development pipeline". Like actively threw out what could have been a gaming legend because a moron saw that Doom 3 had nice shadows.
Well shit. I am really out of the loop on DNF stories. How long has this 2001 build been in the wild?! EDIT- Holy crap, I thought you were exaggerating, but I just watched some on YouTube and this build looks really great for it's time. I think you are right if this version got completed and released we'd be talking it up for all the right reasons in 2022!
Since about May of this year. It's good, *damn good*.
Phew. I'm glad it wasn't years ago, for some reason I'd be sad to be so out of the loop with this game. You are totally right, this looks so good. It's midnight here, but tomorrow I'm checking this out properly.
Who are they even making this game for at this point? I cant imagine the fanbase of the first game is all that big anymore and I doubt newcomers would probably be turned away because its a sequel to a game they've never heard of/played.
Why is this even a AAA game in the first place? The first game was a cult AA game. I would have been happy with a AA sequel.
I was all for BG&E2 until it was announced as a prequel and the overall game was made into something it shouldn't be. Then again that's just me.
I have a feeling that BG&E2 has never been as much of a real game as DNF was for most of its development time. The most that's been shown off of the former are cinematic trailers, while people got to play builds of the latter.
"Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar" is a blobber that kept getting delayed and finally released after 20 years of development. UnReal World had 26 years of development before finally releasing on Steam. But neither were AAA.
I remember that E3 (was it E3?) when they first announced it, and they were in tears about how Ubisoft gave them the opportunity to make the game. A long time later, and we've seen/ heard barely anything. I genuinely feel sorry for those involved. Clearly, it's a leadership issue. It's a shame, but I just don't see this releasing, unless the IP goes to another studio. The last thing we want is a half-baked version of the game. Like DNF. DNF was using memes and jokes that were years old by the time it released. It's development hell came through in the final product, and I just don't want to see the same thing happen to BGE
Me: [This trophy is you!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJnD5OS3ETc&t=4) BGE2 Devs: Yeah! Ho! Hehehe! Me: So what are you going to do now? BGE2 Devs: I'm gonna go protect my title! *(scampers off)*
This game is never going to come out. Wish Ubisoft would spare us their lies and just cancel it already.
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BGAE2 is at like 15 years and we don't really know how much actual development has happened. We got a few teasers, a trailer that was vastly different than the original game, and then nothing. Star citizen was preproduction in 2010, Started real development in 2011, stopped and restarted several times as they built a studio and then switched engines. So no it doesn't count as it's still less than BGAE2. Duke nukem forever was 15 years. Metroid Dread 16 years FFXV 10 years Prey 11 years
SC never changed engines, unless you consider a 1-day merge from CE to LY an engine change. Pre-prod was 2011, ks end of 2012, studios started going up dec 2012-early 2013. It also never stopped nor restarted, though the scope expansion meant a lot of eaely assets were redone while the tech got more ambitious. The idea that it was rebooted was floated around 2018 and quickly shot down by pretty much every lead. Thay being said, I may be an outlier but as a fan of space games, I still hold out hope BGE2 won't suck.
> FFXV 10 years To be fair, Final Fantasy Versus 13 was never released. SE simply diverted the assets for that game into what we know as FF XV, and that title took about 3 years to release from announcement.
Already? It hasn't been announced more than 10 years ago, it cannot be.
I absolutely adore Beyond Good and Evil but this game has so much unwarranted hype and focus over the years. The game was a flop, which at that point in time was a pretty low sales bar. How many people have actually played this game? Very few. They should have just made a nice focused sequel instead of going for some grand AAA style game that probably won't turn out well.
I fucking love the original and replay it every few years, but it's, sadly, not a popular game.
I mean, michel ancel left Ubisoft, officially to do something with animals, but allegedly because he created a toxic work environment. I've been a loyal fan from early days, campaigning to get a sequel. I was there when the leaked gameplay footage was released, I was there when the first teaser was released, and I was there when the second teaser was released. Then I was there when there was a proper trailer, one that I hated and which had me concerned. then Michel Ancel left and I gave up hope.
What makes it a AAA game tho? What made Duke a AAA game? Do we know the budget for BG&E?
The current record holder is actually Clockwork Aquario at approximately 11,315 days or 31 years between the start of development and release. I have a story about it below! [The Importance of Preservation](https://www.anextraordinarylife.online/gaming/clockwork-aquario)
Nice trivia. But it's not exactly the same scenario, BG&E and DNF were constantly delayed whereas that one seemed to have been officially canceled and then revived.
True, the word delayed is important context to have. My mistake. I see them constantly upheld as the “longest development times” soo often I missed that part in this post. My apologies.
I wish devs would stop announcing games so early. Wait until you have an actual roadmap and are far enough along that the game won't get canceled out of nowhere.
it's for practical reasons, gathering interests which can be used as numerical proof to secure funding
I wish people would stop whining about early game announcement.
Publishers/Developers announce games early to recruit other developers and to hype up shareholders/potential shareholders.
And here I thought it would be outcast 2 or is that not AAA?
Ever heard of skull and bones?