Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil mastermind, Michel Ancel, has spoken to the possibility of Beyond Good & Evil 2 being built on the same engine that powers the recently released (and highly acclaimed) 2D platformer Rayman Legends.
Ancel told Edge that by utilizing the UbiArt Framework engine, the studio can be much more efficient in the development of the long-awaited sequel, especially when considering the engine's ability to allow the computer the handle much of the grunt work.
I think it’s very interesting to see how much you can integrate and put artificial intelligence in the tools so you can really order the computer to do things. It’s a very interesting way of working, to see where and how humans are involved in creation [and where the computer takes over].
There’s not so much difference between the two because, as soon as you start the process of sharing human [development] with the computer, you can translate that to more complex games. We have done research and it’s something we are working on, but I can’t mention too much about that.
When asked specifically about how it may be applied to a game like Beyond Good & Evil 2, Ancel went on to add:
We’re doing research that could help even for bigger games. We believe we can achieve big games even with this size [of studio]; more could be done by the computer and we can focus on the really important things done by real people.
The content and the quality of the content will be different. That’s something we’ve learned with our tools on Rayman Legends; in fact, those tools improve the quality. It was also funny to see how many people in the team can create content with the tools. Sometimes in [this business] you say, ‘Oh, this veteran is better than this young guy,’ but what if the veteran is only better at the technical things?
When those two people are using tools that are easy to use, technical things don’t matter; it’s more the imagination and ideas that are very important. But we need to practise and use the tools, and now that Rayman Legends has been finished, we are going to move back onto triple-A games with those tools. I think it could be very interesting to talk about it in a year, and to see how far we’ve come.
I don't know about you, but I can't wait to learn more about a sequel to Jade's enchanting adventure now that Ancel can finally dedicate some proper time to working on it. Here's to hoping Ubi's E3 presser next year will have some juicy new details.
