Ubisoft recently announced the delayed release of Skull & Bones and now added Beyond Good & Evil 2—but noted they will be coming out soon.
Last week, the gaming world was disappointed with another delay announcement for Ubisoft’s Skull & Bones—as this was the sixth delay now. The other project in question was Beyond Good & Evil 2, which was announced to also be in an extended period of development. The publishers released a statement that the development of both games was making headway. Following the delay announcements, a new 30-minute gameplay video of Skull & Bones was released from Ubisoft.
A Ubisoft representative told Eurogamer, “Beyond Good and Evil 2’s development is underway, and the team is hard at work to deliver on its ambitious promise.” While this was reassuring in the slightest, it was good news that the game was not cancelled like the three unannounced projects. The bad news was that they have not announced a new release date.
Beyond Good & Evil 2‘s first trailer came out almost fifteen years ago, longer than the sequel to their other classic game, Duke Nukem Forever. The original Beyond Good & Evil was released back in 2003. The company’s last biggest push for the game was when they premiered a new game trailer at E3 2017.
However, fans already knew the game was still in the early works of development when the then-director, Michel Ancel said the team was still at “day zero” in development. Ancel left the company in 2020 after being investigated for his alleged toxic management style.
Speaking on premieres, Ubisoft unveiled new gameplay footage for Skull & Bones. The trailer offered an inside look at how the narrative elements in the game would work within its open-world and multiplayer style.
The narrative director, Joel Janisse, explained, “Investigations in Skull & Bones are really a way to tell a story via a series of steps. The player follows a trail that they think will be interesting and likely gets a lead to some kind of treasure…but it also tells a story about our factions and our world. We do that, for example, by finding messages in bottles, scraps of lost journals, sometimes talking to different characters in the world, and through that, we’re able to tell a story.”
While the trailer contained some cool, insightful information on the game, it did not convince me enough to be assured that the game will be in my hands anytime soon. The latest release date for the game was supposed to be March 9, 2023, for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Amazon Luna and PC.
Ubisoft said that Skull & Bones will be expected to release within the next fiscal year—which begins April 2023, up to March 2024. The company left fans with a statement on the game’s Twitter, “Additional information regarding our new release date and upcoming test phases will be shared with you all very soon.”
Whether these games will actually come out creates even bigger questions. Should game companies be releasing trailers and big promises while the game is still in early development? I think it could work when companies can offer their fans technical tests, which games like Halo Infinite and Company of Heroes 3 have been doing of late. Beyond Good & Evil 2 has set a new world record for the longest game in development, with a concerning 5,234 days and counting.
