It combines elements of online worlds, early-access releases, role-playing games, and procedural generation. It’s also, admittedly, still pretty rough around the edges. Many of the game’s key elements — from graphics to combat to narrative — are still being implemented.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Ancel says, “but we now really believe that we’re going to make this game.”
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Three years ago they started working on the technology that would power the experience — it started out as a kind of solar system simulation tool — and only recently have they started actually building the game. “When you don’t have this technology, you can’t really start the game,” Ancel explains. “It’s too difficult. But now we can say for sure that we will make this game, we’ll finish it. Because we have the technology for it.” He describes the game’s current status as “day zero of development.”
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It all sounds incredibly ambitious, especially when you consider that Ancel also wants to treat Beyond Good & Evil 2 as something of an early access title, with a community of players offering feedback and testing early prototypes. The version of the game I saw, meanwhile, was still in a very early state. The graphics were mostly placeholder (Ancel says that “two weeks ago there were no graphics”) while aspects like combat and any kind of narrative aspect had yet to be implemented.