Beyond Good & Evil 2 is reportedly too safe to cancel, and that's the problem

What do you call a game that supposedly can't be cancelled, can't be finished and can't decide what it is? For 18 years the answer was a joke. Now it looks more like a management case study, and a rather expensive one.

A new report from the French outlet Origami, as Video Games Chronicle summarizes, claims Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in pre-production. Several hundred people reportedly work on it, mainly at Ubisoft Montpellier, while the team keeps trying to settle what kind of game it should be. Treat all of this as a report based on anonymous sources, not as confirmed fact. Ubisoft has not announced a release date or platforms.

The identity crisis is the real delay

The most revealing detail isn't the calendar, it's the pivots. According to the report, between 2019 and 2022 the game was meant to be a connected multiplayer "third place" across many planets. It then reportedly shrank to four players, then two, and is now a "solo first" story adventure with co-op. The tone allegedly drifted from "Zelda in space" to something closer to Insomniac's Spider-Man games.

Any one of those is a defensible game. Together, they describe a project that restarts its argument every couple of years. The report says the game has historically failed to meet its creative milestones because ideas keep changing, and, as Insider Gaming quotes it, the questions never stop: is the game cool enough, innovative enough, can the loop be more engaging? In our view, that is what happens when "pre-production" stops being a phase and becomes a habit. Nobody can say "this is good enough to build," so nothing gets built.

Immunity to cancellation would be a poison, not a blessing

It's tempting to cheer every time the game survives a purge. We think that's the wrong reflex. The report's own line is the sharpest in the whole story: if a project is never cancelled, could it also never end? Time Extension notes that the troubled Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake was cancelled in January of this year, while this one has been spared. The same sources reportedly think that may finally change given Ubisoft's restructuring, though there are no signs of a cancellation yet.

A cancellation threat is a forcing function. It makes a team lock a vision, cut features and show something playable. Remove it and the incentive to decide disappears. Michel Ancel, who left Ubisoft in 2020, blamed clashes between managers in a 2024 interview. If that diagnosis was right, a change of creative director, including the October 2024 appointment of Fawzi Mesmar, doesn't fix a structural habit of moving goalposts.

Ship a smaller game or let Jade rest

Ubisoft is now restructuring into autonomous "creative houses," and Beyond Good & Evil 2 was confirmed to belong to one. That could be a genuine chance: a smaller, accountable unit with a clear mandate. It could also be the last stay of execution. Time Extension makes the fair point that a project can bleed time, money and talent for another decade, and at some point those resources are better used elsewhere.

Our verdict: pick one of two honest paths. Either commit to the solo-first version, set a hard gate for full production and show real gameplay, or announce an ending and let the franchise be remembered for the cult 2003 original. The worst option is the current one, a permanent maybe that ties up several hundred salaries and slowly erodes the goodwill of the people who loved Jade.

For players, the advice is simple: don't plan around this game. If a trailer arrives with a date, celebrate. Until then, the reported "starting line" is just that, and 18 years is long enough to stop running in place.