Beyond Good and Evil 2 gets first official update from Ubisoft in years: ‘working as we speak’

It’s been a very long time since we’ve gotten any new updates on Beyond Good and Evil 2, but Ubisoft has offered a sign that the long-delayed game is still alive. In a video interview with Polygon centered around Rayman Legends Retold, brand director Loïc Gounon confirmed that the game is still in active development.

Confusion around Beyond Good and Evil 2’s development status has been swirling for years. Ubisoft rarely shares updates on the game, which has left players hunting for clues. Last November, Eurogamer discovered that Ubisoft was actively hiring for the project. Gounon gave a more direct confirmation that the project is in motion while discussing the problems Ubisoft had to solve to remake 2013’s Rayman Legends.

“There was another constraint: That was, we don’t have any Rayman team anymore,” Gounon told Polygon, “because the last team was Rayman Legends. I was a part of it, on Origins and Legends, and the team went on other projects. Some of them are working as we speak on Beyond Good and Evil 2. Some others left the company. We didn’t yet have that core team in place, including Michel Ancel, who left Ubisoft.”

That offhand statement is about the closest thing we’ve gotten to an official update in years, outside of Ubisoft confirming that it was not canceled earlier this year. First announced in 2008 and then re-revealed in 2017, Beyond Good and Evil 2 has faced a number of setbacks over nearly two decades. Director Michel Ancel left Ubisoft in 2020, though the company stated at the time that Ancel hadn’t been involved with the game “for some time now.” Then in 2023, the project suffered a tragic setback when creative director Emile Morel died at age 40. Fawzi Mesmar was appointed as creative director in 2024, but we haven’t heard much movement on the project since then.

Gounon cleared up one more piece of internal Ubisoft news during his interview with Polygon. In 2024, Ubisoft confirmed that it was working on a new Rayman project at its Montpellier and Milan studios. It also noted that Ancel, Rayman’s creator, was working as a consultant on the mystery project, despite his departure from Ubisoft four years earlier. The news was mired in controversy, as Ancel had been accused of fostering a toxic work environment during his time at the company, a claim that he denied. Gounon provided some clarity on Ancel’s involvement in Rayman Legends Retold.