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Michel Ancel : working on both Wild and Beyond Good & Evil 2 is "unreasonable"

Alx

Member
... he's still doing it though, BGE2 in the morning, Wild in the afternoon. :)

Interview by French newspaper Le Monde :
Original article
Google translation

Selected quotes to follow, but the whole article is interesting.

About BGE2 :
"What is certain is that bge2 is a fantastic project. Space, planets, travelling at 15 000 km / h ... It's something crazy. All of this can run on current consoles, and it works. With this kind of project, we can show video gaming is some crazy stuff, that still has a bright future, ".

Michel Ancel works in the morning on bge2, an adventure game with a comics atmosphere in a science fiction world populated by pigs and talking rhinos. In the afternoon, he switches to Wild and its prehistoric shamanic world, populated by wild animals and large natural areas.

About No Man's Sky (discussed for sharing aspects with BGE2) :
"They have made huge efforts to hide the models, yet the people eventually see them.Just by watching the videos, we who are facing the same kind of problems, we see the mathematic models. It's like seeing the matrix. "

Apparently no clear release date for either project.

Other info (thanks to LordKano for parsing and translating it) :

The article is really long so I couldn't translate everything, but here are the bullet points :

- It's Yves Guillemot who called Michel Ancel to make Beyond Good & Evil 2. He was going to leave after Rayman Legends (the article says Origins but it's probably a mistake) in 2013, since he just co-founded his new studio Wildsheep, but he just couldn't say anything else than "yes" to the Yves Guillemot's proposal.

- The original project started in 2007, and was abandoned in 2009, at Michel Anciel's will. They started to work on it again in 2012-2013, and he feels like he still needs three to four years to finish it, but even then he's not sure.

- He call it a "fabulous project". It's really ambitious, but possible with the actual consoles.

- He still works on Wild during the afternoon of everyday, and the morning he works on Beyond Good & Evil 2. Both games are open-world.

- In Wild, the nature is the center of the experience. He talks about how Rockstar perfectly understood it in GTA, with the landscapes, the colors, the rain. He promises an "essential" experience, partly because his studio, Wildsheep, has a limited budget for the game.

- In BGE2, the heart of the game is the "civilisation". BGE1 talked about mass manipulation and the medias, but this one will be completely different. It will talk about conspiracy and the human aspect. There will be a lot of surprising characters.
Translater's note : If some FrenchGAFers are here, how do you translate "côté grouillant" and "profusion" ? I can't really find the good words here.

- He talks about No Man's Sky, about how they did all they could to hide the models, but people saw them nonethless.

- Something extremely important for him is the pace. If we're moving fast, but the background is large and well-paced, with discovery to make, then we won't get bored.

- Right now, they are creating the world of the game. It's really its heart. Then, they'll start to work on the narrative side.

- There's no release date, both projects are "crazy", they've made significant progression but they still cannot start the communication about them. These are unreasonable projects.

- He's a bit scared that if Vivendi buy Ubisoft, they couldn't finish the game.
 
Good. Don't give a shit and Beyond Good & Evil, but I want to see W!ld. Glad see to he has his priorities in check.

Edit** He is shelving W!ld? That's bullshit. No wonder we haven't gotten an update in well over a year.
 
By the wording it doesn't sound like Beyond Good and Evil is a Switch exclusive, I guess he can't out right say anything else though.
 
I feel like he's stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand he has WiLD, which sounds interesting, but is a pretty hard sell, and on the other he has a sequel to a cult classic, which probably isn't going to set the world on fire and is only really going to appeal to fans of the original, or people who were interested but never got to try it out.

Neither game are going to do amazing in terms of sales in my opinion, so I can understand his problem. Personally I'd prioritize a BG&E remake first, to get new people interested in the franchise.
 

Tratorn

Member
BGE is the game I'm most excited for on Switch (if the rumours are true, which they probably will). The wait will be worth it.

I'm excited for WiLD as well though, hopefully it won't be killed by development hell...
 

LordKano

Member
I could translate the article when I go home in about one hour and a half, because some of the Google translation here is irking me.
 

Alx

Member
I could translate the article when I go home in about one hour and a half, because some of the Google translation here is irking me.

Please do. I'm trying to fine-tune the OP quotes with a few edits, but there's so much more in the article.
 

oti

Banned
That BGE quote implies it isn't a Switch exclusive to me

I think the story goes they had to stop development on BG&E2 back in the day because consoles couldn't handle it, now they can according to Ancel. It could still be exclusive.
 
Good. Don't give a shit and Beyond Good & Evil, but I want to see W!ld. Glad see to he has his priorities in check.

Edit** He is shelving W!ld? That's bullshit. No wonder we haven't gotten an update in well over a year.

Ancel is not shelving anything, I don't get how the thread began with all those shitpost. He works on Beyond the morning and on Wild the afternoon.

Going by the interview, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is going to have a blockbuster budget while Wild remains more modest because it's just made by its indie studio Wild Sheep, even if Sony is the publisher.

Yves Guillemot called Ancel in 2013 and proposed him to make Beyond Good & Evil 2, so that Ancel would not leave completely Ubisoft. The game will talk about swindles, plot and will focus on the human dimension with "a swarming aspect", "a lot of curious characters" and "a feeling of plenty". Sorry if that does not make sense, I'm mostly going with google translator here >.< But they are going with a big, rich world, it suggest. Personally, I really doubt about that Switch exclusive story.

As for Wild, the nature will be at the center of the experience. "Rockstar understood that well : the landscapes, the warming of colours, the rain, everything, it brings emotions. In Wild, we are going to really work on those aspects." It will be a "intimist, essential experience", in part because Wild Sheep is limited in what they can do.
 

DOWN

Banned
ahem

Laura Kate Dale is a reliable source and she said it's exclusive to Switch.
Lol yeah, that's the source of the rumor we all are referencing

Doesn't change that the quote suggests they have the game working on the current array of consoles if you optimistically read into his quote
 
WiLD looks like a high-end version of Zelda U, I hope they can bring it out soon. The last showing looked really good (especially since it confirmed that it isn't some MMO only).

That BGE quote implies it isn't a Switch exclusive to me

futurama_shocked.gif
 
The biggest fear here is Vivendi. If Vivendi wins over Ubisoft, there's a chance Yves Guillemot won't be here after the takeover and that the project (bg&e2) might never sees the day, since Yves was really fond of the project.
 

Quasar

Member
Can't say I ever gave a shit about BG&E. I was hyped for Wild though. Of course the same was true of Rime. Hopefully it does not go the same way.
 

benny_a

extra source of jiggaflops
As long as both come out at some point that would be grand. To me it doesn't matter what platform, as long as it exists.

Of course it would be nice if not only Ancel was allowed to work one more creative games with seemingly mid-tier budgets.
 

Frostman

Member
Can't say I ever gave a shit about BG&E. I was hyped for Wild though. Of course the same was true of Rime. Hopefully it does not go the same way.

This is what I'm worried about. We haven't heard about Wild in over a year, I just have a feeling that it's going the direction of Rime where Sony will drop support, and the game just won't see the light of day.
 

manueldelalas

Time Traveler
There is no way that a huge 3rd party like Ubisoft makes a game to be full exclusive. Timed exclusive is what all of them do, and this is since forever.
 

FelipeMGM

Member
If Nintendo funds it like they did with Bayonetta 2, it was remain exclusive this time lol.

I doubt is that, first thing is that Ubisoft is not SEGA. They have loads of cash

Second, Ubi was clearly using BG&E2 in the Vivendi debacle as an example of how independence is important for them, that makes it possible to greenlight creative and less tradiotinal stuff like this game, that pleases hardcore fans instead of going to mass market appeals. If then its found that Ubi isnt actually funding that, and that it only exists because of Nintendo money, than that message is lost I think.

Will play it anyway, Im on the Switch love ride

EDIT: Also not calling out Laura in any way, she is clearly well informed and I trust her a lot with her reports. Just still think this one specifically is weird
 
Possible, or its exclusive like Bayonetta 2, Lego City, Project Zero 5, etc. We will see in two years when it release.

Indeed, it could be this, but if you look at two Ubisoft games that were Wii U exclusive (Rayman Legends and Zombi U), they both ended up coming out on other consoles. So I think it's a safer bet on it not being exclusive since it's Ubisoft.
 
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