The biggest news of the week is undoubtedly Ubisoft undergoing a “major reset” as a company, shaking up its portfolio by cancelling six projects, including the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake, delaying seven other projects, and spinning up four new IPs; and that’s just what we know happened to its portfolio. The whole structure of the company was shifted around to boot, but through all of this mess, one long-running project survived: Beyond Good & Evil 2.

A game that was said to be “years away from release“ after it had already been in production for 14 years at the time of that report (which itself is now four years old) is still worth burning money on, according to Ubisoft. In fact, the company still believes that the game has something to offer that makes it a “unique proposition” when compared to other modern fantasy games.

“Beyond Good & Evil 2 remains part of our portfolio and our roadmap and fits with our strategy of focusing on open world adventures,” a Ubisoft spokesperson told Eurogamer, before continuing to say that fans of fantasy games are “underserved,” and that Beyond Good & Evil 2 remains a “unique proposition” for players.

We’ve known about Beyond Good & Evil 2 being in development at Ubisoft since 2008, when it was first publicly revealed. Since then, the last time we saw an official trailer for it was at E3 2017. And while Ubisoft deemed the six to seven years spent on the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake were ultimately unsalvageable, the nearly 18 years it has spent on Beyond Good & Evil 2 clearly aren’t in the minds of Ubisoft leadership. They were even hiring people for the project as recently as last November.

(This is the same leadership that led the company to lose 95% of its value in the last eight years.)

Ultimately, who knows if this game will ever come out. If it does, and it’s a hit, that’s great for Ubisoft and for the people who will have likely been waiting a full 20 years for it to release. But it’s more likely that no matter the quality of the final release, no game, Beyond Good & Evil 2 included, can live up to the expectations of a 20-year development period. If anything, you might find more people expecting the worst after it remained gestating for that long.

The fact that people are still working on it, and that there are still players waiting on it, is a testament to the mark left by the first game, which you can thankfully still go and play, and will be able to play for many more years now that a remaster of Beyond Good & Evil is available. But with every passing year, the idea of Beyond Good & Evil 2 releasing as a ‘masterpiece of a video game worth the two-decade wait’ is a pitch that becomes less and less convincing.

And that’s all without mentioning the real kicker in all of this: by the time it comes out (if that day ever arrives), will anyone actually care? Which is to say, it’s always a gamble when trying to bring back something old and make today’s consumers who didn’t grow up with it care about that thing.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 has been in development long enough to go to college, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if today’s generation of young players, who are more interested in playing ‘forever games’ like Roblox, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V and Minecraft, couldn’t care less about a game from over a decade ago they’ve only heard of in passing, if they’ve heard of it at all.

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