Beyond Good and Evil 2 Is Still Being Developed — And Has Now Been in the Making Longer Than Duke Nukem Forever

Key Takeaways

• Ubisoft Bordeaux’s Lead Writer and Associate Narrative Director Rik Godwin has confirmed on Bluesky that he worked on Beyond Good and Evil 2 in a support/consultant role for part of 2026.
• Godwin was given permission to confirm his involvement but shared no further details about the game’s status or direction.
• BG&E2 was first announced in 2008, re-revealed at E3 2017, and still has no release date.
• The game has now surpassed Duke Nukem Forever as the longest-running AAA development cycle in gaming history, estimated to have cost Ubisoft upwards of $500 million so far.
• BG&E2 survived Ubisoft’s January 2026 cuts, which cancelled six other projects including the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake.
• Ubisoft Bordeaux — the studio Godwin works for — is one of multiple support studios contributing to the project alongside main developer Ubisoft Montpellier.
• The Beyond Good and Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition is currently available for $11.99 on Steam and the Ubisoft Store.

Yes, Beyond Good and Evil 2 Is Still Being Made

Every few months, like clockwork, gaming gets its reminder that Beyond Good and Evil 2 still exists. And here we are again. The latest signal has come from an unlikely corner — a Bluesky post from Rik Godwin, Lead Writer and Associate Narrative Director at Ubisoft Bordeaux, who has quietly confirmed that he spent part of 2026 working on the game in a support and consultant capacity.

Godwin — who has previously worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows and the Ghost Recon Wildlands: Last Rites expansion since joining Ubisoft in November 2023 — was given permission by Ubisoft to confirm his involvement with the project. Beyond that, no further details were shared. There’s no new footage, no release window, no reveal of what he actually wrote. Just a confirmation: the game exists, people are working on it, and Ubisoft Bordeaux is among the support studios contributing to the project alongside main developer Ubisoft Montpellier, based in the south of France.

It’s the quietest kind of update imaginable. And for a game with this development history, somehow that feels exactly right.

Just How Long Has This Game Been in Development?

Let’s put some numbers on this, because they really are staggering. Beyond Good and Evil 2 was first announced in 2008. The original Beyond Good and Evil — a cult classic action-adventure starring photojournalist Jade — launched in 2003. The sequel has now been in some form of development for longer than the gap between those two dates and the present combined.

In 2017, Ubisoft effectively rebooted the project and re-revealed it at E3 as an ambitious online co-op prequel set in a vast interplanetary sandbox. It looked stunning. People got excited. And then it went largely silent again. Years passed. The original Creative Director, Emile Morel, passed away suddenly at the age of 40 in 2023, a tragedy that hit the development team hard. The studio’s managing director also departed around that same time.

By 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 had already surpassed Duke Nukem Forever — long considered the gold standard of gaming development hell — as the longest-running AAA title in history. By the time Godwin posted his Bluesky update, the game had been in active or semi-active development for the better part of two decades. Reports from industry insiders suggest that the accumulated development cost is likely north of $500 million, a sum that would make any publisher wince — and that arguably explains why Ubisoft can’t simply walk away from it.

How Did BG&E2 Survive Ubisoft’s 2026 Cuts?

January 2026 was not a good month to be a Ubisoft project. The publisher announced a wave of layoffs that closed studios and killed off six games, including the long-awaited Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake — itself a project that had been mired in delays and restarts since 2020. Fans braced for the worst when it came to Beyond Good and Evil 2.

It didn’t come. BG&E2 made it through. Director Fawzi Mesmar confirmed in the aftermath of the cuts that the game was still in active development, and Godwin’s more recent Bluesky confirmation lines up with that — suggesting that support studios have continued plugging away at the project throughout the year. Whether surviving Ubisoft’s 2026 restructuring reflects genuine confidence in the game’s future or just the sunk-cost logic of a publisher that has already spent half a billion dollars is a question only Ubisoft’s executives can answer honestly.

What We Know About the Game Itself

The most recent glimpse players got of BG&E2’s narrative came not from a trailer or a showcase, but from a hidden mission buried inside the Beyond Good and Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition in 2024. That re-release of the original game included an exclusive treasure hunt that served as a story bridge to the sequel, offering a deeper look at the childhood of protagonist Jade. It was a small piece of connective tissue, but it confirmed that Ubisoft was at least thinking about how the original and its sequel fit together narratively.

The game as last officially shown is a prequel set in a planetary system called System 3, a sprawling interplanetary sandbox focused on piracy, exploration, and co-op play. It requires a persistent internet connection for both its single-player and co-op modes — a design decision that raised eyebrows in 2017 and has only become more contentious as the always-online model has attracted increasing player backlash over the years. Whether that requirement remains intact in whatever version of the game eventually ships is genuinely unknown.

If you want to revisit the original while waiting, the Beyond Good and Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition is currently available at a discounted price of $11.99 on Steam and the Ubisoft Store. It remains one of the most underappreciated action-adventure games of its era — which is exactly why its sequel carries the weight it does.

A Game Caught Between Legacy and Limbo

There’s a particular cruelty in the position Beyond Good and Evil 2 now occupies. The original game is genuinely beloved — a creative, character-driven adventure that found its audience slowly and never quite got the commercial recognition it deserved at the time. Jade is one of gaming’s most memorable protagonists. The world Ubisoft Montpellier built around her was full of charm and atmosphere. The sequel doesn’t just have to be a good game — it has to live up to something that has grown larger in memory with every passing year.

That’s an enormous ask under normal circumstances. Under the circumstances of an 18-year development cycle, constant leadership changes, a creative director’s death, multiple studio restructurings, and an evolving games industry that looks almost nothing like it did when BG&E2 was first announced — it’s nearly impossible to conceptualise.

And yet. The game is still being worked on. Developers are still filing through its doors, some of them specifically clearing it with their employers before mentioning it publicly. In a year when the games industry has been defined by studios winding down projects and companies reshaping their entire strategies, the fact that BG&E2 continues to breathe is, in its own quiet way, remarkable.

Whether we ever actually get to play it — and whether it turns out to be worth the wait — remains the industry’s longest-running open question. For now, all we have is a Bluesky post, a 20th Anniversary Edition on sale for $11.99, and the stubborn persistence of a game that simply refuses to stop existing. In a strange way, that might be the most Beyond Good and Evil thing about it. Just like the unexpected discoveries that keep older games feeling alive, sometimes it’s the things we least expect that endure the longest.